3D world to fly over.

[Familyman]

here is what i am wanting to do, and then maybe someone can help with how to do it.
I have an Animation of a space ship flying through space and heading towards a planet, the next scene I want is as follows,
Camera view flying through this world, through valleys and over mountains,
then I want to have that turn into the viewer is behind the ship so you see the ship from behind flying through this world.
So basicaly i guess I am asking is there an easy way to build a terrain and animate the camera flying through it?..
Can be a third party program (preffer Free).
Any help would be great thanks.
Jamie.

[B3dman]

get terrainim8or and make the terrain with that then just make a path through the terrain and attach the camera to the path
(i have not tried this but it should work let me know )

[thecolclough]

ensoniq5 has done something sort of like that (you can see it here), i think his technique was pretty similar to what b3dman said (right, ensoniq?).  as an alternative to making a path, you can just animate the camera location and orientation using keyframes.

with what you said about the ship coming into view, i'm guessing you mean the ship moves into view at the bottom of the image, as if the camera had sort of slid backwards over its roof (as per the attached storyboard)?  that's easy to do, you'd just make the ship object a child of the camera, and animate it moving from minus-something in the Z-axis (behind the camera and out of view) to plus-something, probably plus-100 or thereabouts, depending on the size of the model.  that should give the result that the ship glides smoothly into view in front of the camera as the camera moves.

sorry the storyboard's a bit rough, but hopefully you can tell what i was trying to draw...

anyways, hope that helps

- colclough

*edit*  my 250th post, and i get Senior Member status!  oh yes   *is happy*

[ENSONIQ5]

Yup, that's pretty much exactly what I did.  Ignoring the camera for the moment, I defined the position of the vehicle in the terrain at certain key frames, which basically defined a spline, which I could modify with the normal spline tools.  Once the motion of the vehicle was defined, I was able to use this for all the views.  For the follow view, I defined the camera as being a child of the vehicle in terms of position, as colclough said, and set its position behind the vehicle, but kept it's orientation a child of the "world". (I used this technique for early test renders, but the view of the rear of the ship was very fixed.  For the final vid I moved the camera's position frame by frame, relative to the vehicle, so it followed the same actual path as the ship, just a little behind, and defined it as facing the vehicle.  This felt more like a follow cam, less like a camera mounted on a stick poking out the back of the vehicle)

For the in-vehicle shots, I constructed a cockpit that was kinda like a film set, with no back wall.  I made the vehicle invisible, defined the cockpit and camera as a child of the invisible vehicle (both position and orientation), and filmed the whole thing again, picking the bits I wanted later, and giving them post-production detail frame by frame in Corel.

Oh, and yeah, Terranim8or is the go for building terrains.  It can build 3D terrains from greyscale bitmaps (white is high ground, black is low ground) as well as fractals and other cool stuff.  It is a free download, is designed to work with Anim8or,  and has loads of other cool features.

Good luck with your project, I like the way you think!  I, and many others, are always ready to help with advice and tips, on this site as well as animanon.com and anim8or.org.

[Familyman]

A big thank you to everyone, I haven't treid the suggestions yet, (will try later today), but from what I have read you guys understood what I was trying to say and from what I have read and viewed (nice animation by the way) this is exactly what I am wanting to achieved.
I am always amazed at how friendly this forum is, at least I have found everyone to be that way anyway.
Thanks again.
Jamie.