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Moving Camera Perfect Loop

I’ve been perfecting a way to get a perfect loop when camera movement is involved, so here is an early test result, again made in Blender. Sorry for the horribly grainy header image, here it is in its full gifv glory.

Here is a .blend file for you to have a look at. Feel free to use this in your own work, just link to this page so others can use this template too.

If you prefer explanations, here’s a slightly simplified overview of what’s going on:

  • There is a scene that is duplicated multiple times (though in this example, only two copies are necessary) in a row, let’s say the y axis.
  • The camera moves smoothly and linearly in the y axis between these two identical scenes, and in particular between a corresponding location in each so that its view is identical in the first and last frame of motion animation.
  • Change your end frame of the scene to be one frame less than this, so that the first and last frames in the animation aren’t identical, and it smoothly transitions between the end and beginning.

That should help you create these from scratch, but if you’re trying to make sense of my .blend, then here are the additions I’ve made to make to give me some more flexibility:

  • I use an array modifier to allow an arbitrary number of copies of your scene into the distance. This means the camera can point off to the distance and the effect will still work.
  • The camera is not animated manually, but with a “generator” that moves it exactly as intended. This gives you more flexibility if you want to change the length of the loop.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought of this GIF below, and I’ll try to answer any questions of anything in my download isn’t clear.

Published in Motion