Rough Sets, Blocking, and an Animatic - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 104

and your Blender scenes this way so that it will be easy to tell
at a glance later if you are working with the intended cam-
era and scene. In a single scene production, you can simply
use the “shot01”, “shot02” notation. For animations that have
more than one scene, you can expand that to “sc01.shot01”,
“sc01.shot02”, with the fi rst number designating the scene and
the second designating the shot. Of course, you are free to use
any naming scheme you care to, as long as it will be clear what
is what if you revisit the project a year from now.
Select the camera and adjust its position to your fi rst best guess
of where it will show the shot that you see in the fi rst sto-
ryboard. Use Ctrl-Numpad-0 to enter the camera view and
use the translation and rotation tools to do your best to match the
shot to your illustration. One rotation method you may not be
familiar with is the “Trackball” style that is triggered by pressing the R key twice. Try it from the camera view
with the camera selected. I've found that this is a much more intuitive “true to life” way of aiming the camera
than the standard rotation tools. Also, don't ignore the Lens value on the Camera panel of the Edit buttons .
It defaults to 35, which is almost certainly more wide angled than what you have drawn in your storyboards.
If you have not used this control on your cameras before, a higher value equates to a greater zoom in a physi-
cal camera and lessens the effects of perspective. Lower values are the equivalent of zooming out, with very
low values (around 20 and below) giving a wide-angle lens, almost a fi sh-eye effect.
Of course, you are welcome to use a more traditional “multiview” when adjusting the camera, with front, side,
top, and camera views fi lling a divided workspace. The trackball method explained here is certainly worth
your time to try, though.

Figure 7.14 The image properties panel set so that
the story reel displays properly in the Image/UV
Editor window

NOTE
When working in a camera view, you
may want to enable the Passepartout
option in the Camera panel of the
Edit buttons and set its Alpha value
to around 0.5 . Passepartout darkens
the area outside of the camera's view
so you can get a better visualization
of what your shot will look like, as in
Figure 7.15. Be careful not to set the
Alpha value the whole way to 1.0,
though, because you won't be able
to select the camera to adjust it while
in a camera view.

Figure 7.15 A camera view with Passepartout enabled and set
to 0.5