Hello,
Is there an easy way to animate a 3D object within a 360 panorama.
For instance, a vehicle coming towards you from a distance, I’m unable to get in close to it while in the 360 view to fine tune the animation.
Is it possible to do the animation within a standard studio setup and then export that to the 360 view or is there another way?
Thanks
Simon
Not sure if this is the best way, but still: you can add an Anchor, then use that to act as an origin / coordinate space for working with 3D objects. Have all your 3D stuff in a group and set the group’s Relative To to the anchor:
Then when you’re finished, you can just set the group’s Relative To back to the 360 view. All this assumes none of your objects have their Relative To prop set individually - they need to be left at “- - -” to inherit their space from their parent in the hierarchy - or at least be Relative To something else that’s Relative To the anchored Group.
Thanks for your reply. I’m going to give this a go this afternoon. Fingers crossed!
Hello,
So I’ve just tried this but the only downside is that as soon as I set the group Relative To the anchor, the 3D object disappears from view so I can’t actually see it within the area. I’ll keep trying.
If you’ve already placed the group of object way off in the distance (relative to the PhotoSphere) then when you parent it to the Anchor instead, it’ll still be way off in the distance somewhere (though possibly behind you now, depending on which way you’re looking). I’m guessing the group’s Position is quite a way from [0,0,0] (?) My bad - I should have thought it through better.
You need two reference points, origins, in the scene, ideally. One locally - that Anchor - that you can use to pull the group up close to you so you can animate it. Then another off in the distance, set relativeTo the PhotoSphere, that you can attach your group to once you’re finished playing with it and want to “put it back” in the scene.
I’d create a new group to use as that far reference point - add a new Group, set it relativeTo the PhotoSphere, and copy the Position coordinates from your “3D objects” group to it. You should now have an empty Group in the distance, where the objects are supposed to be when you’re done.
You can now go to your “objects” group, set its position to [0,0,0], and then set its relativeTo to either your Anchor, or that distant Group we just set up. You can switch between them freely, and your group of objects will jump to the near or far points respectively. (If you want to move where that far point is, you can do that easily too - move that empty “far” group. The objects will be carried along, but their local position will still be at [0,0,0] as far as they’re concerned)
The problem was that your group of objects was positioned a long way away from whatever it was parented to. Which was grand for the PhotoSphere - but meant that when we wanted to pull it closer to work on, that great big offset was still there.