Centre viewport on (range) feature in animation

PeterVersteeg

Hello,

I am working on a animation with a feature with range data. just like this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq4rzFPXwr4&feature=emb_title

At the end (02:00) of the video he tells that it is possible to centre your viewport on the feature (so it follows a route, fly along the lines). 

Anyone know how you do this ?

Greetings Peter 

Nathan Shephard

Hi Peter,

Glad you're giving animation-using-range a shot! 

Here's the help topic that describes how to maintain a constant "look-at" viewpoint across multiple keyframes in your animation.

• https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/help/mapping/animation/animate-the-camera.htm#ESRI_SECTION1_3381500A1AED43049AAC7A5B1A7C9E91

To be clear, it does not track (or lock on to) a feature, but rather it ensures the camera is always pointed at a fixed XYZ location. The primary use-case for this is a fly-around a feature (like a building) or a partial "hold eye contact" at a point (like a sign) as the camera flies past it. For the video link you sent, this technique was not used (because its not pointing at a fixed location).

If you have a moving feature (or an extending connected series of line features, like the paraglider path), then you will need to update keyframes with a manually-edited camera viewpoint. Note that you do NOT have to give every keyframe a full camera definition, so if you have many (eg: hundreds) of keyframes you only need to apply a camera definition for a few of them, and the animation will interpolate between them.

Depending on how you created the keyframes, they might already have no camera information. An easy way to see this is to change the filter on the Timeline pane (screenshot attached) so only 'Camera' is on, and see which keyframes disappear - for my example, keyframes 4,5,6 have no camera information.  To remove the camera information from a keyframe, select it (can select many at once) in the Timeline pane, open the Animation Properties pane (from the Animation ribbon's Edit group), select the Camera section, and click the arrow to move the values to the Disabled side (screenshot also attached).

To add/update the camera properties for a keyframe, double-click it in the Timeline pane (you may need to disable the filter to see all the keyframes) to zoom to its current state (including range value), then move the camera to a good viewpoint, and click the 'Update' button on either the Timeline pane or in the Animation ribbon.

I also recommend enabling the animation Path display option (on the far left of the Animation ribbon) and zooming out in the view to see the flight path of the camera.

Hope this helps!

Thanks, Nathan.

TimelinePane_Filtering.png

AnimationProperties_DisableCamera.png