From the course: 3ds Max: Cinematography for Visualization

Keyframing a track-pan

- [Narrator] In this chapter, we will create compound camera movement in which we animate more than one transform at the same time. We will begin with a standard track pin in which camera moves side to side while also panning side to side and we'll use that as a cinematic technique to best show off our architectural interior model here. I've prepared the scene with the simple rig in which the camera is parented to a helper object as we've seen in previous movies. Before creating any key frames, let's determine which of the axes need to be keyable. Select the move tool and from the Reference Coordinate System pull down list, choose Parent and select the camera and in this mode we can see that the side to side movement of the camera will be the x axis; then, let's check in on the rotations, choose the rotate tool and switch it's Reference Coordinate System to Gimbal and looking in the view, we can see that the z axis is the one that controls panning left to right. With that information in mind, let's go to the Curve Editor, open that from the main toolbar and on my system I've currently got Selected Objects filter enabled and Animated Tracks filter disabled and with the camera selected, we can see its position in rotation tracks. In the View menu of the Curve Editor, enable Keyable Icons and remember that we want to keyframe in the x position, so let's disable keyframes in y and z for position. Panning is going to be rotation around the z axis. In this case, you can see we have two z rotation axes and that is a cork of 3ds Max. Earlier in the course, we saw that we needed to choose Z X Z as the axes order. I will turn the keyable icons off for the red and green tracks, leaving the blue track keyable. Very good, we can minimize the Curve Editor and create our animation; the camera is located at the same position as it's helper parents. Let's offset it. With the camera selected, choose the Move tool in Parent space and at frame zero, push the camera over to the left a little bit, compensate for that position by rotating, choose the rotate tool and in Gimbal mode in the top view, rotate to frame the shot and that will be our starting position and rotation. Then, enable Auto Key; go down to frame 120 on the timeline, grab the move tool again, position in parent x; then, grab the rotation tool, rotate around the z axis and we've got our pan and track happening, so we can turn off Auto Key, rewind and play. See what we'll get. One thing we want to watch out for is the subject here, which is the plant; we don't want that to change screen direction and pierce that it's not changing screen direction much if at all, so we've got a pretty good result actually just on the first try with this one and that's how to create a simple track pan animation with the camera parented to a helper object.

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