A path for the camera

We can make a path for the camera to follow with a normal spline just as you are used to with splines. Most of the time this will be done in the top view and this is very quickly achieved. But if you want to edit the Spline path, you will need to go into point mode as you would normally do. If you're planning to animate the spline you need to do this through PLA (Point Level Animation) recording.

As I mentioned in the overview section at the beginning of the review, there is another option to make spline paths and is done with the ScoobyPath Creator object. The advantage of this object is that we can animate the (Created) Null objects like any normal object. Thus we can create an animated path very easily. As with normal splines, we want to start in the top view to begin laying out a path. First you need to add the ScoobyPath Creator object. This object is found in the Plugin dropdown menu. Once this object is added you can start with adding Null objects as path points. The nice thing about the ScoobyPath Creator is that we don't have to manually create null objects. In the attributes manager of the ScoobyPath Creator there is a button that will create Null objects for us.

Path Creator object

Every time we click on the add path object button a new Null object is created as a child of the ScoobyPath Creator object. Best thing to do is to lock the attributes manager so it will stay open on the ScoobyPath Creator attributes. This way you can add a Null object and move it to the place of choice without leaving the Attributes Manager of the ScoobyPath Creator object.

Path Creator object in action

A spline is created between the Null objects. We can define the spline type as well. We can use all the spline types that are available in CINEMA 4D. I found the Cubic type the best one to use. We don't have to think about which intermediate points we set the spline to. It is always set to Uniform by default. Even if it shows another type, it is set to Uniform. Like normal splines we can set them to be closed if we want to. In this example I closed the spline so I have a closed repeatable path for the Camera to follow.

Creating a spline between the 2 nulls.

Now that we have the camera setup and we have a path to follow, we need to tell the ScoobyCam Expression where to find the path. This is just a matter of dragging and dropping the ScoobyPath Object in the ScoobyCam Expression Spline object field. First we need to enable the Align to Spline option and after that we can drag and drop the ScoobyPath Object into the spline field.

Spline settings

As you can see we can enable the Tangential option as well. If we turn this on the Camera will look ahead in the direction the path is going. This is useful for fly through type animations. We even can add another ScoobyPath Object to the scene and blend between those two ScoobyPath Objects. If we press play, the camera will stay put and not follow the path. This is because we need to tell the ScoobyCam Expression what we want to do. There are two ways. The first is to animate the position slider. This slider will move the Camera from the start of the spline to near the end of the spline.

Spline settings

Or secondly we can set the Link Spline Position to Time

Link Spline Position to Time

Here you can fill in any frame number in the total amount of frames you've set the animation to. It will start and stop on the frames you set it to. If you set it from 0 to 100 and you have 100 frames of animation, it will move from start till end during the 100 frames. If you set it for example from 25 to 75 it will start at frame 25 and end on frame 75. Within this range the camera will complete the whole path but at a much faster speed.

As you can see it is very easy to setup a ScoobyCam. Of course this is only the beginning of what you can do. There are so many settings to play with and tweak that I can't possibly show and explain you every possible scenario.