Turning a camera

Fly throughs are among the easiest animation since all it requires is moving a camera over a scene. Hence, a good fly through animation depend on a smooth flow of the camera. Just moving the camera wildly over a scene isn't pretty enough. The sample TurnCamera.java illustrates how to make a camera turn smoothly.

Ease-in and Ease-out

Suppose the camera is to be rotated 90 degrees as if turning the head. Instead of turning it at a constant velocity, we could employ ease-in and ease-out to smoothen the effect of turning. We could move the focus point of the camera from 0 to 90 via a semi-circle path. The path could be defined parametricaly. This would allow us to increment t from 0 to 1 and ease-in ease-out to provide the desired effect.

Send comments to muniandy@cis.ohio-state.edu