In this Blender tip video, we’ll take a look at Blender’s Camera Fly Mode tool. This is a great to help navigate your 3D scene, and also for camera placement (or any object set to be a “camera”, for example a Spotlight).
Subscribe to our Blender RSS Feed to receive our latest articles and education from Blender Cookie.
30 Comments
That is a cool tutorial. That is something I can experiment with in a lot of things I do.
Keep up the great work
great tip. I did not know about the keys for fly mode
That painfully reminds me of the now utterly useless SpaceNavigator I have that nobody seems to want to write a Plugin for for Win7 64bits…
I wasn’t aware of the panning mode until now.. it surely helps to keep the movement more stable. Thanks for this detailed tip Kernon.
@Corniger: Wow, I completely forgot something like this existed. Is it as intuitive for 3D navigation as claimed? Does it work in all Blender versions? Obviously not on x64 systems…
Well, I personally love(d) it. You just float around, especially sometimes when you have a mesh that is really complicated to maneuver around in with a mouse. Handy for fine movements, the mouse is faster, but imo also quite straining sometimes. All it does is use the Flight Mode, so if you like that, the tool is right for you. Just make sure you have enough room next to your keyboard. I have been using it with 2.48/9, but noone cares about the 64bit users (HELLO, that stuff exists since 2005 and longer, it is the future, HELLOOO-OOO!
)
Haha, yeah, the pace of adaptation to new technology like this ain’t so pleasantly seamless but things change slowly and steadily. Anyways, thanks for the response.
BTW, careful with those translucent steeds (needed to look that up in the dictionary), afaik they tend to randomly change translucency value, likely leaving you unable to locate them in the middle of the battle! %-)
Cheers
Great tutorial! how did you do the city?
Excellent tip! Like Maxinova I’d like to know how you did the city… it doesn’t look like a discombobulator setup.
Thanks for the comments!
The Fly mode is really fun and can feel more like a game sometimes. This can also be used to point spotlights. Just select the spotlight, and press Ctrl-NumpadZero to make it the active “camera”. You’ll probably need to do some rotating to get the view properly oriented. Then, press Shift-F to begin flying around with the spotlight. With GLSL turned on, you can press Alt-Z to go into Textured mode. Now, you can see the spotlight’s lighting effects while flying around. It’s interesting to fly around inside of existing models because you can see very interesting structural shapes.
Thanks for another tip about setting up the lighting!
Oh, the quick cityscape was created with two passes of the discombobulator script (with different settings, of course). I did a fractal subdivide (actually too much because I was originally thinking more of a small village) so that all of the shapes wouldn’t be perfectly square. I also translated a few of the “building” top faces along the z-axis with proportional editing turned on. This helped to create more variety.
This is one great feature . Thank you for explaining the details , I often use this to , set my camera up , okay , but still yet I would wish, that blender team made the camera much easier . Like using the user view
One nice tutorial , It made me think of watching an animation flying through (wire frame ) over Chicago long ago as a Student of Marwen foundation .
Dear Kernon,
thanks for the tip. Nice tool to pose the camera.
I’m wondering if there is a way to record the camera
movement in fly-mode to camera-IPOs? That would
be a very handy animation tool.
Any suggestions?
Kind regards,
serum…
Call me a noob but I would assume you could animate camera movements this way by simply flying the camera to desired key positions and adding key-frames at each of those positions… i -> LocRotScale and such. No?
yes, that works, too. but then you have no control on the
camera speed as far as I can see. but I might be wrong on
that point…
Yeah, you can record to IPOs, but the results can be less than optimal. At least that was my experience with the little bit of testing that I did with it. So, with some experimenting it might work pretty well.
To record the Fly mode navigation, you need to be in a “camera” view via Numpad-Zero. As mentioned, it doesn’t have to necessarily be a Camera object. You also need to have the camera object selected while viewing thru it. You’ll need to open a timeline window, and an IPO window would be helpful as well. In the timeline window, turn on Auto-keyframing via the red button. In the drop-down list beside the button, make sure Add/Replace is selected. To begin recording, press the Play button on the timeline window, then press Shift-F in the 3d view to enter Fly mode and begin navigating. When you exit the Fly mode, the recorded keyframes will be visible in the the timeline and IPO editor. The timeline will still be in play mode so you’ll need to stop it. Keyframes are set for every frame as soon as you press the Play button, so you’ll have to align the keyframes to where you want them to begin via the IPO editor.
Have fun!
That sounds pretty neat. I’ll check that with auto-keyframing
at the weekend or so. Thank’s for that quick reply, Kernon.
Best regards,
serum…
OK, I checked it a few minutes ago. It works quite good.
I guess one can tweak the animation by manually edit
the IPOs. Should not be such a big problem since most
of the LocRotScale-keys are nor needed if you use bezier
interpolation.
at least, this is cool for q’n'd camera dolly animation.
regards,
serum
Whoa, that all sounds really, really cool! Looks like I’d best go ahead and make a 32bit co-installation and configure a flight-axis roll…
But purely theoretical: would it be possible to also draw a path that way so to tweak the flight somewhat? Is there a script or anybody who could write one?
You can add a Time IPO curve to control the speed by selecting the Time channel in the IPO editor and placing points in the IPO editor. Points above zero will control the speed forward, while points below zero will control the speed moving backwards.
ah, cool. that makes life easier on this subject
)
thanks!
So the speed is controllable, but the actual flight/camera positioning can be hand keyed later on? Sorry, I really am not familiar with animating yet
yes, you can edit the keys in the IPO-editor by hand
thats a cool feature of blender, i especially liked your part about using it for cameras duplicating and setting up different angles of ones scene ‘on the fly’, thats much better than dragging the camera around the classical style…
that was a great hint again *thumbsup*
best regards
Maybe you should make another tip tutorial on how to animate a camera in fly mode, just so that everyone knows its possible, and that its an easy way to do a moving camera without having to setup curves, and a track to object.
Great tutorials!
this script comes already with the new blender or i do have to download it? anyway i want to know how to get to it….i new it in 2.49 now i cant find it in 2.5 please help me
The Fly Mode feature is available in 2.5 via hitting Shift + F.
sorry, i was talking about the city creator
how did you make the city? i would really like to make a city like that but i dont know how.
nice video it was really helpful.
Great tut….I personally like the idea of positioning multiple cameras for different scenes…..Thank you again for another great tut…..I can not wait for the new release of the New 2.5 DVD training series….