Shaker Mel Script For Shaky Camera

[langano]

Hello

I have been doing modeling and texturing for quite some time now and have just started getting more into animation.

I found this really awesome MEL script on this page.

Shaker 1.0.0

Reading through the description i thought it was gonna be a piece of cake to animate the fade in fade out of the jitter, however i quickly learned that was not the case.

Okay so here is what i did (my interpretation of the description anyways)

I created the camera i wanted animated. I load the script while the camera is selected, right... so now the script node gets parented to my camera and it looks good in the outliner.

I make sure i have the shakycamera node selected in the outliner and not just the camera since that in essence selects both, and then i set a keyframe at frame 1.
I set my magnitude to 1 on the shakycamera script. (start of the animation)

now i jump 100 frames forward and set another keyframe and set my magnitude to 4.
....Now i was convinced it was gonna work since i thought the code would take into account the tween motion it would need to do to blend the 1-4 magnitude over 100 frames.

The magnitude set box in the script attributes turned this bright orange/yellow that indicates it's a dynamic value that is being animated.

Right, lets play this thing, nope...this is not working.

It plays the scene at magnitude 1 through all frames. There is no fading upwards in more magnitude (movement)

....I have tried several combination's and so far i have come up with nothing.

It would be great to see if this lovely community has anything to offer in advice to my particular situation or better yet, you may even have used this script successfully with a fading in/out animation.

Or maybe you have a better idea on how to achieve a shaky camera effect that can be faded in or out.

The animation i am doing is for a ship flying past the camera and as it starts to get closer i want the shaking of the camera to increase and as it passes and puts more distance to the camera i want it to fade back out.

Cheers

[doug-hines]

What does your animation curve look like for the Mangnitude attribute? Is it a smooth/linear spline or is it stepped/platteued?

[langano]

strictly linear. The scripts offset values (the ones who control smoothness are all set to default values and in the graph editor the animation shows a linear curve.

EDIT: Just to make it clear. I have not tied myself to this particular script in any way.
I am in the market of any good way of achieving good shaky camera with a dynamic feel that would fit an outerspace environment.

However, since i am rather new to animation so that whatever you do post regarding this please make it easy to understand.

[langano]

Hello guys i just thought i would say i figured it out thanks to greyskull (the author of the script)

It was a simple matter of setting the individual channel to a value at given keyframes.

I set my keyframes for all channels using the s (set key) option and thus it did not work. Once i got that down it worked like a charm with fading in and out the jitter.