AHA! I know a tool I should build then... and it won't be too hard.funksmaname wrote:well, there's 3 empty spaces next to your point camera tool that are waiting to be filled...
how about 'dolly on target' - we could have a non rendering camera target layer...
My main issue is i don't want things warping really - since this is 2D animation, i want all planes to be always perpandicular to the camera rather than skewed in 3D...
maybe if we had the same tool as you already have but have it do the move instead of tilt, and we could run both tools if we want both functions? then we could control zoom manually on top of those keys? *shrug* thinking on my feet here, i've not really used camera moves much until recently, and then for some reason the zoom/move weren't happening at the same time, so i was getting odd camera moves... possibly just me being rubbish
The problem with PointCamera is it IS a 3D tool. That means if it is looking at a layer (well, it's origin) and the layer moves in the Y direction, you get non-zero tilt.
Zero tilt only occurs if the camera and the origin of the layer are at the same Y height.
SOOOOO...
My next tool will be the following (and this one I bet I'll have done before the end of the weekend):
FloatCamera
What it will do: Using the selected Layer, for the given range of Frames adjust the height of the camera to be the exact same height as the Layer.
This will only effect camera position, and only it's Y-coord.
Now, assuming you are working with a 2D paradigm (i.e., 2D characters in front of a 2D background that are on different 'plane's, not different distances), COMBINE FloatCamera and then PointCamera (and the order is important, these are not communative operations) and you get the effect you want, the layer is always dead center and no-tilt. This is becuase it will first raise the camera to match the height of the layer. Thus, when PointCamera is now applied, since the difference in the y-coord is always 0, there is NEVER ANY TILT!
But there is still going to be SOME distortion. It IMPOSSIBLE to make a visually non-centered rectangle look like a perfect rectangle! That's becuase as soon as you get off-center one side of the layer is closer than the other, so it will appear longer (parallax effect).
Basically, like it or not, Anime Studio is a 2D program that can only work when embedded in a 3D space. Putiing this simply, the camera can't be in the same plane as all the layers, or there would be nothing visible. So, the camera HAS to move away from the plane, and that can only be done in 3D space. And, the farther back you move, the more parallax there is. But, more importantly, if you can see it, there is ALWAYS a parallax effect.
BTW, the real world works the same way... even more so since we have two eyes looking from two different locations...
But at small distances this is not noticable. But I say this because rectangles will almost never be PEREFECT rectangles, but close enough for government work.
So I'll do FloatCamera this weekend...
