Animated Camera Rotation Problem

[t.coursey]

So I've ran into this two or three times now.  When setting up a camera motion if I have the rotation say that goes from 340 to 20 or something like that, the camera when in motion rotates 380 degrees, not just 40 degrees as I set it up in the scene view.  Does that make sense?

I'm not sure the answer programatically but I know in my other software it keeps adding up past 360 so you don't have this problem.  Meaning if I was at 340 and wanted to go 40 degrees in that direction my endpoint would be 380.  This way it would interpolate my movement correctly.

Maybe another simple option would be a checkbox or something for clockwise or counter clockwise rotation?  Please I need a fix/work around.  Thanks!

[silent]

Hi Trey,

Do you have an example tracker file or maybe you can record a short video of this issue?

[Amerio.Stephane]

Hello,

I too find the way rotation are handled in Tracker very disturbing: the rotation channels are interpolated as if they were indenpendant, which is not the case most of the time.

As coursey described, a starting point at (340,0,0) and an end point at (20,0,0) should use a *spherical* interpolation, using the shortest path, and not use *linear* interpolation.

Maybe this should be added in a future version, maybe like RotationXYZ_SLERP in addition to the existing ones.

[t.coursey]

8 hours ago, silent said:

Hi Trey,

Do you have an example tracker file or maybe you can record a short video of this issue?

Yes here is a video I took this morning.  I don't think the numbers matter so much as the situation.  Maybe there is a different interpolation as @Amerio.Stephane says. I'm not sure the answer I just know I've run into this a few times and the last time I could not create the animation sequence my client wanted because of the direction and movement that was required.  :(

[cryunreal]

Hi!
You should use Player Persecutor and any target node (node dummy for example)
And i recommend you this videotutorial about tracker tool

[Amerio.Stephane]

Hi cryunreal. Your proposition is valid when the rotation controls the *aim* of an entity (like a camera). In some case, you cannot rely on a simple direction vector: for example in our case when animating the landing gear retracting, which is a multiple axis rotation.

[cryunreal]

For this task i recommend you to use several node dummy  as a parents for your animated objects. For example, you can animate a wheel by X axis and his a parent node dummy by Z axis.