Camera Zoom By J.L. White Requirements: LightWave

hile working on some routines for Visual FX for Image FX, I decided to try one of them through Lightwave as well. This article is about that routine. If you have ever seen a documentary on TV you have seen this effect. They use it ALL the time. The one I am talking about is when they show an old photo and then zoom in on one section or one person in the picture. While most use special equipment to do this, I knew it could be pulled off easily in both Lightwave and Image FX. The included scene comes in both LHA and ZIP formats for both Amiga and PC. Sorry, but since I do not have a MAC I did not have a way to archive it for those users. If you have a MAC and can read either a ZIP or LHA file you should have no problems with this. With the defaults in Lightwave it took about 3 minutes per frame to render on my 060 Amiga and about 18 seconds on my 200 MHZ Pentium. The version for Image FX on the Amiga takes about 5 seconds but that will be included in Visual FX, not here. Hey this is a Newtek mag right? :) Anyway, Lightwave has some very cool routines built in for camera control and this routine was a breeze to pull off. The example is just that, it is set up to give you ideas and you can edit it any way you want.

The scene uses only one object which is a flat plane with the image mapped on. This is the same object used in one of our earlier articles called "Roll Your Own".

Figure 1

The first key frame for the camera is set to show the entire image. The last frame is moved to half the distance. Anything closer might start to show pixelization, but you can adjust that if you wish. As shown in Figure 1, the view is set to TOP and Camera is selected to edit and Move. The scene is set up so you can adjust the X & Y only of the camera. Just click on the Z axis if you want to adjust that as well.

Figure 2

Figure 2 shows what the scene looks like on the First Key Frame. Figure 3 shows what it looks like on the Last.

Figure 3

All you have to adjust is the default image and the position of the Last Key Frame. You can use a single Framestore, but the nice thing about this scene is you can also use a Flyer Clip. Say for example you shot a clip and after looking at it you said, "Hey I wish I had zoomed in on those folks when I shot it!". Well with this scene you can load that clip in and zoom in using Lightwave. This is great on those "Wish I had done that" days. The last frame is set to be right in the center of the image, but you can adjust the X & Y settings to place it anywhere you want. Always do a test render on the last frame first, before you commit. Just be sure you don't go too far so you miss the image. The background is set to black so even if you do, it won't look too bad. Figure 4 shows that we use a Tension of 1 to give it a smooth ease in and ease out effect. This is set on the first and last key frame for the camera. If you don't want the ease in or ease out, simply change it back to 0.

Figure 4

If you have a Toaster Flyer, you can create a Flyer Still out of the first frame and the last frame and then adjust the time on each to view them for a longer period of time, then place your Zoom clip in the middle.

Well that about does it for this article. I hope you give it a try and experiment with this a bit. If you come up with some really cool uses for this, let me know. Until next time, this is Bodean saying "Hey, I can do what I wish - even when I forget!"

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