Last winter I was working on this city in Carrara 2.0, and I'm picking up where I left off. I've done a lot of modeling, but not much actual animating. Now, I want to install a camera and motion path and back a camera slowly down the street. I'm stymied on the tutorial in the manual...right at the start. After the sphere is installed, the 'add point' button [when clicked on the active plane wall] will not make a point. I feel like I'm overlooking something simple, but what?

The easiest way to start a motion path for a camera with C is to take your camera and put it at the starting position. Then move your timeline slider to the end position and a new keyframe will be created. THEN change the motion type to motion path. Say yes to the dialog box to accept the change and you will see a motion path appear that will follow between those 2 points. Now you can add points and move them and all that fun jazz. Have fun! :D

Excellent! Thank you. I did engineer a solution last night using an antique copy of the Carrara 1.0 Bible. In that, they tell you to start building the path with the fourth tool in the line-up, the Extend Path tool, instead of the Add Point tool. That worked, but the points, while they looked good in the first view, were found to be all over the ballpark in the other two views, so a lot of adjusting was necessary.

I will re-build the test animation using your suggestion. Thanks again.

A word of warning- if you are still using CS2, motion paths were a bit squirelly- save often! I had the most luck making sure that any changes I made to the motion path were done with the scrubber at the frame 0 position.. Markd

Oh yeah.. C2... I forgot about that problem. If you are NOT at the 'time 0' time on the timeline, then the motion path can move around and is difficult to manuever around. If there isn't an exact NEED for a motion path, can you just do it with keyframes? OR... if you'd like to draw the motion path at 'time0' then change the animation type back to 'explict' you can then have both options. A clear visual about where the camera is going, and a more reliable animation type so you have fewer crashes. I would reccomend saving to version numbers, instead of just saving over the same file. And also close down C2 after a bunch of edits so the memory bug that's in the motion path part of the program doesn't build up and corrupt your file. :( (Gloom and doom here, eh?) Have fun! ;)

OK, thanks for the comeback. So far my modifications have been minor [adjusting light levels, etc.] but I have always started at Frame 0 and updated at each keyframe. However; I will consider myself warned about the 'squirrel factor' in C2. I plan to upgrade to C4 soon.

I've seen some great C4 landscape stuff in the Gallery section. Is C4 competitive with Bryce and Vue these days?