Hello, I'm Jon, and welcome to another tutorial
in our "Getting Started with Earth Studio" series.
In this tutorial, we'll be covering two powerful features in Earth Studio:
camera target and multi-view.
So as always, to get started I'll make a new blank project -
I'll call it "Camera Target" -
and I'm going to navigate to Philadelphia,
because they have really beautiful 3D imagery, especially downtown.
And I'm going to just position my camera
so that it's more or less facing Logan Circle right here,
and I'll make my first Camera Target.
And this is really simple to do; I can just right-click anywhere on the screen
and select "Set Camera Target" from the menu.
And so a lot changes here.
We have our camera view here on the right, that we're used to,
but we also have this new view, and that's our top-down view.
And this is super handy, because it gives us a bird's-eye perspective
of our entire animation.
We see our Camera Target represented as this little target icon right here,
and we see our camera represented - both its position and orientation -
as this pyramid shape right here.
And this is just standard Google Maps, so if we scroll in and out we can zoom
and we can click and drag to reposition the map.
And the nice thing about this is that everything is dynamically linked
between the top view and the camera view,
so if I were to come here and drag my camera, you'll see that it locks right on
to this new Camera Target
and everything updates in real time.
So it's a really fluid way of re-positioning your shot.
So I can also move my Camera Target around right here in the top-down view.
And you'll see that when I do that,
there's this red circle here where my Camera Target used to be.
And this is because there's a keyframe set there when I first set the Camera Target,
and that shows up in our attributes list
under this new group called "Camera Target".
And it has a longitude, latitude and altitude with keyframes set,
just like our camera position.
There's also this Influence, attribute, that we'll cover later.
And because our Camera Target is an attribute that appears in the timeline,
it means that it can also be added or removed
through the "Add Attributes" menu above the attribute list in the timeline.
If we click here, we'll see that we have this Camera Target at the top,
and right now it's active, it's green, we can also turn it off and turn it back on
very simply - and when we turn it on from the attributes menu,
it'll just put our camera target at whatever is directly
in the centre of our screen.
So for now, we have this Camera Target, its position is set,
and if we move our target off the keyframe and move our playhead,
it snaps the value back to the saved value,
and the same thing applies with position -
this is basically just like it works in normal animation.
If a keyframe is set and we make changes but don't keyframe them,
they won't be saved.
So with that in mind, we're going to go to the last frame.
We're going to move our Camera Target so that we're looking right over here
at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (I believe is the name),
and I'm going to set a camera target keyframe at the bottom here
and I'm gonna do the same thing with our camera position
facing right around here - keyframe -
and now you'll see that we have these lines drawn between our keyframes,
and this is basically the exact path that our target and camera will follow
as they move between the two keyframes that we've set.
We can edit this path by dragging these keyframes,
and that will actually update the value live,
so now these keyframes have new values as we move them around.
I'll undo that.
We can also move our camera here and set a new keyframe and our path will update.
So right now,
we have this kind of nice view as we're travelling past Logan Circle
along this road right to the Philadelphia Art Museum,
but let's say around halfway here we want to -
not really want to be so close to the road, we want to have more of a
bird's-eye view of the city, more of a macro view.
And to do that, we're just going to drag our camera out here,
and we're gonna create a new keyframe.
And when we do that, Earth Studio automatically smooths our path,
so that as we go through this keyframe,
instead of being a harsh angle it's a nice smooth curve.
And we'll see that we have these Bézier handles here, these easing handles,
that allow us to adjust the shape of this path.
So if I click and drag these, we'll see that our path updates.
And if we right-click on this, we'll see that we have some options;
we have smooth path, and this is our default auto-smooth algorithm,
and it basically just finds the perfect tangent for longitude and latitude
to give us a nice smooth curve.
We also have an option to make linear, which will get rid of any easing handles
in the Top View.
And if we command-click, we can toggle between smooth and linear.
And we can also unlink these handles if we want to have direct control
over one half of the keyframe.
So very cool here.
A few more things to cover,
one of which is the other multi-view angles up here.
In addition to the Top View we have a North, South, East and West view
and these are just side views in each of the cardinal directions.
So this is facing North -
we can see and edit our animation from a side view, which can be really useful.
We also have this "Influence" attribute under "Camera Target" that we mentioned earlier,
and this is an extremely powerful tool.
You might have noticed while we've been animating that this yellow caution sign
has shown up next to our "Camera Rotation,"
and that's because by the nature of Camera Target,
we're overriding our Pan and Tilt attribute values
because we have to set those appropriately so that our camera
is always facing the target.
But if we were to set our influence to 0, we'll see that the caution sign is gone,
and that's because whatever our values are here
are now taking priority.
Now our camera is totally ignoring the Camera Target
and just going on its merry way
depending on whatever the pan and tilt keyframes are set to.
And we can do some pretty cool features with this.
So for example, we moved our pan here so that we're facing
kind of along our path,
and if we come out here to frame 240 or so
and we set our influence back to 100,
we'll see that now our camera is facing the target again.
And as we scrub back in time,
we'll see that Earth Studio is merging those values together,
it's blending them so that as we go along the animation
we're slowly pointing directly at our target.
And if we ease this a lot,
we can get a really smooth effect where our camera is kind of flying along its way
and then it slowly moves back to face our Camera Target.
So that's all for now in this Camera Target and multi-view tutorial.
As always, please check up on the documentation
to see some more detailed information
and some other tips and tricks about working with these tools.
Until next time.
Thanks a lot for watching - bye!