Good morning everyone! Been a while since I’ve actually posted on BA. Got an idea I need some resources for, figured I’d ask here first!
I want to create a camera rig in Blender in the same vein as the Gaffer script in the Blender Market makes lighting easier by creating lighting rigs. The idea for this camera was inspired by an After Effects camera rig setup called Malty Camera Rig, which if you use AE in any capacity you should get because it makes life so much easier.
In this script, it would create a two-point (or two node) camera setup using a relationship between a camera and an empty that allows for incredibly easy smooth camera movements with just a few keyframes. In Blender, I currently have to create this camera rig each scene (or append a pre-created camera rig) consisting of the camera which has a parent and track-to constraint to the empty, and the empty itself. And then, to animate the camera and the empty requires selecting each object and animating it depending on what you want it to do. It starts to get messy when you’re trying to figure out which element (camera or empty) to animate.
What I’d like to do is create a script that would create this camera rig, then have a window (or toolbox or whatever a nested tab would be either in the ‘t’ toolbox that appears in the viewport or as an actual button in the Properties window) that contains single keyframable value that would affect the camera rig in some way.
For example, I would imagine this script working in this way. In the “Camera Rig” toolbox there would be a button that would say ‘create camera rig’. Upon clicking it, the camera rig would be populated in the viewport. Then a list of new inputs would appear. One might say ‘Orbit’ with a number next to it. When the user would click and drag the value, it would cause the empty to rotate along its z axis, causing the camera to ‘orbit’ around the area where the empty currently is. There would also be other variables that would control either the empty or the camera’s general position/rotation/scale.
So how difficult would something like this be? Any resources you can point my way that would assist me in creating objects, setting variables, having toolbox windows always integrated in Blender? I’m definately more of a coder than an artist but I’m keen to make this work.
Thanks everyone! Appreciate any pointers you could give. 