In this video tutorial we’ll demonstrate how to easily create complex camera moves in Blender.

Written instructions:

Let’s begin by building a simple tunnel, in order to demonstrate an easy method for creating camera animations in Blender. We’ll add a cylinder with eight sides, and no caps at the ends. Then we’ll rotate it 90 degrees and bring it to edit mode. Scale it longer and add some loop cuts so that we can bend it smoothly. For the bending, let’s use the simple deform modifier and switch it to bend-mode. We’ll simply use the default lamp for the axis origin and play with the deform angle value. When happy with the bend, we’ll go to object mode in order to apply the modifier. Now let’s find the start of the tunnel and snap the camera to it with control-alt-0.

We can further tweak the camera position by entering the camera fly mode with shift-f, moving around with the w,a,s,d keys and the mouse, bit like playing an fps game.

Now we are ready to record so let’s enable the recording button. Then we’ll simply hit play and enter the camera fly mode again with shift-f. Now we’ll just do our best to guide the camera through the tunnel, and everything will be recorded as keyframes on the timeline.

The result looks pretty nice but it has some shakiness from the mouse movement. Let’s open up the graph editor in order to smooth things out. We’ll also enable the simplify curves add-on from the user settings. Now we’ll make sure our curves are selected, and then hit the spacebar and search for the simplify curves tool. At first, nothing seems to happen. That’s because we need to change the margin of error here. Now our curves are getting nice and smooth, as you can see from the result here.

Here’s the finished render. We’ll cover creating the details with the discombobulator tool in our next video, so stay tuned! Thanks for watching and see you next time on One Minute Video Tutorials.com!