The interactive spline paths for cameras (and in general) have some serious problems, as detailed on this thread on We Suck Less -
http://www.steakunderwater.com/wesuckle ... f=16&t=725anyone trying to control a camera move with any precision might want to look at the clever rigs posted there by Dunn that help to get around the limitations of the 3D move splines.
Some of these limitations and problems are detailed in my own post copied below - any response from Black Magic re: the possibility of improving them (i.e. better control of the ease in - ease out functions at key frame positions or at least an explanation as to how the current ones work as they seem bizarre to say the least) would be greatly appreciated.
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I've been controlling animation with spline curves for pushing 30 years and I just ended up pulling my hair out with a fusion camera animation, and not for the first time. Although eyeon/Blackmagic recently added "interactive 3D splines" and make a big deal of it in a lot of the marketing/PR hype I find they're pretty much unusable for any work where fine control of movement is needed.
For example, make a camera move in 3D space where the positions of the keyframes are irregular, as opposed to evenly spaced in time and in location. Look at the red path line in the viewer - it will be linear by default. So you can ease in and out off the spatial positions using the spline graph but your camera or object will still go through that position - if it's a sharp corner your camera will do a sharp corner. You can cover it a bit with spline ease in and out but the cornering will still happen.
If you select the path and right click you get a drop down that has some limited options, one of which is "smooth". If you select that you get another pull down that lets you limit the smoothing to xyz axes/positions, all good. You seem to have to actually select the path point in space, though, and it seems to work some of the time but not others - you can tell it has worked as you get a box appearing about the path and you can now get other options by mouse click.
If you say select all XYZ you do get a "smoothed" version of the path, but with no bezier handles or obvious way to change the strength of the curve at each point. So the path can double back on itself, compress or do any number of weird things, none of which are controllable. There is an "ease in-ease out" function that sort of changes this a bit but it seems to work over the whole path and I have yet to get my head around what it's actually doing. Any of the other usual spline options available in 2D splines are actually greyed out.
I've spent hours on various projects over the last year or so trying to make these 3D splines do what I want and I've come to the conclusion that unless your move is relatively simple you're wasting your time. In fact, I've ended up re-doing the camera move in Maya (where you have much better control of 3D splines) using path animation and baking the camera move, then importing the Maya camera into fusion. You can then have a path that you want and use the 2D spline editor to refine it. A horrible work flow (and the baked camera move slows down the interactivity in the 3D viewport something rotten) but this is the only way I've found to get the 3D move I want.
I realize that I may be talking on a somewhat more advanced level than the initial poster meant and in general I agree with the response above, but if anyone here has found a way of controlling the "3D interactive splines" on a pro level I'd love to hear it. Or even if anyone can tell me what the "ease in-ease out" and "spline taper" gismos that come up with 3D interactive splines are actually doing . . .
And if anyone from BlackMagic development can tell me if any more work will be done to make the 3D interactive splines more usable it would also be very welcome. With the greatest respect what is there appears to be the basic bones of a workable 3D spline animation system but without sufficient control to make it actually usable.
Sat Apr 02, 2016 3:24 pm
