Orientation Locks

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Orientation Locks

You can apply Pan, Tilt, and Roll rotation locks as well as translational locks.

They can be used for path editing and, to a lesser extent, for coordinate system setup.

For example, a roll-angle constraint can be used to keep the camera forced upright. That can be handy on tripod shots with large pans: small amounts of lens distortion can bend the path into a banana shape; the roll constraint can flatten that back out.

If the camera looks in two different directions with the roll locked, it constrains two degrees of freedom: only a single pan angle is undetermined! For example, if looks along the X axis then along the Y axis, both with roll=0. You might want to think about that for a minute.

The perspective window’s local-coordinate-system and path-relative handles can help make specific adjustments to the camera path.

Inherently, SynthEyes is not susceptible to “gimbal-lock” problems. However, when you have orientation locks, you are using pan, tilt, and roll axes that do define overall north and south poles, and you may encounter some problems if you are trying to lock the camera almost straight up or down. If this is the case, you may want to change your coordinate system so those views are along the +Y and –Y axes, for example.

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