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Swandive stream
Swandive stream
Inspiring
May 25, 2023
Question

Adding vibration/shake to motion to look more realistic

  • May 25, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 616 views

I tried wiggle but tends to look a bit fake, keyframing manually looks too violent (in motion). It's meant to be a spacecraft so it won't be silk smooth in motion because engines etc. Any advice?

Thanks

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2 replies

Mylenium
Mylenium
Legend
May 26, 2023

Spacecraft vibrate at the injection rate of the engines, i.e. those tiny little explosions going off in the engine thruster. That and of course there's aerodynamic turbulence during launch, but not in space. To simulate such stuff you would simply use very high frequency wiggles with the real fun part being that the sampling of the actual motion would be sort of random because the wiggle frequency is many times higher than the framerate. Also keep in mind that e.g. a camera mounted on a rocket would not just have linear sideways movement and micro rotations, but also move along its longitudinal axis, meaning that a lot of what would be perceived as motion blur is actually just the camera going out of focus ever so slightly due to the motion. Anyway, we can stand here all day and discuss the theories, but without seeing what you are actualyl trying to do this is going nowhere. You have to provide screenshots or a short clip for more specific advice.

 

Mylenium

R
Community Expert
Rick GerardCommunity Expert
Community Expert
May 25, 2023

Wiggle generates random frequencies and variable motion. It can be turned on and off by markers or keyframe numbers. 

 

You can also introduce decaying motion by adding markers to the layer or additional keyframes. 

 

You can also use a fractal noise layer and layer.sampleImage(point, radius ) to influence X, Y, and Z,  movement on a motion path. 

 

You could even hold your phone in your hand and shoot a piece of paper with a black dot on it while you hit your phone with your other hand to get organic movement in the frame that you could track with Mocha AE to give you some very real impact or hand-held turbulence in the shot. 

 

Boris Effects Saphire also has some very good camera shake or turbulence distortion effects.

 

The most realistic technique depends on the shot. 

 

An embedded instead of attached screenshot of your comp and a detailed description of the shot would help us give you an efficient workflow. 

 

Here's a goofy project that used Fractal Noise to create a shake. 

 

You will need an X and Y slider and this expression to create the motion:

 

fn = thisComp.layer("Fractal Noise");
p = position;
ofst = fn.sampleImage(position, [.5, .5]);
l = rgbToHsl(ofst);
x = effect("X Offset")("Slider")* 10 * l[2];
y = effect("Y Offset")("Slider")* 10 * l[2];
[x, y] + value

 

 

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