Does anyone have advice for how to create camera animations such as this one:
/tutorials/03_capturing_image_and_video/camera_anims/zoom_to_sf.usda
I understand how to make curves in a normal scene.
However I would like to make a curve that goes from a particular lat/lon ground level point, raises up ~400m, goes to a different lat/lon point, then descends.
But it’s not clear to me how the transform coordinates of a camera correspond to lat/lon in the Cesium Georeference.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
@keith_schumacher two approaches come to mind - which one really depends on your particular use case
Animate the Cesium Georeference
You could animate the Cesium Georeference latitude and longitude to move between different locations. Effectively, your camera is staying still and you’re moving the “world” instead. You could combine this with animating the Camera to look in different directions or move locally around the area.
Use a Globe Anchor with the Camera
New in 0.12.0, a globe anchor overrides the default transform of a prim and allows you to specify a lat/lon/elevation for it’s location, which automatically translates it to the appropriate XYZ coordinates in the Omniverse stage. By using a globe anchor with a camera, you could animate by lat/lon/elevation instead of its XYZ transform. The world stay still and won’t move at all, and the camera can remain oriented to the normal of the earth’s surface (useful if you need to fly to the other side of the planet).
My recommended setup would be to use a parent prim that contains the globe anchor, and have the camera as a child prim. This way you animate the globe anchor on the parent prim, and can animate things like the Cameras rotation on the camera prim itself. If you add the globe anchor to the camera itself, it can become hard to animate rotation as it would clash with the rotation from the globe anchor.
note - if you’re flying to the other side of the globe, you’ll want to animate the camera rotation XYZ directly, rather than try to use WSAD or the mouse to move the camera viewport, as the USD Composer camera inputs appear to work in world space rather than local space
Globe anchor tutorials will be coming soon, however for now globe anchors can be added to any prim by right clicking it in the stage and selecting Add > Cesium > Globe Anchor
Click on the prim and you’ll see a Cesium Globe Anchor section in its properties.
We also have some globe anchor examples in our samples repo
