[Thomas]

Second Part: Animation with the Curve Editor and the Targeted Camera

Add to your scene a kind of simplified car. (Below is a sample of a simple shape, modeled in the vertex modeler. On the left, the Assembly room preview, on the right, the vertex modeler preview). This model will help you to learn a little bit more about the curve editor as well as the Targeted camera.

Create a simple animation for the car: put your timeline manipulator at 1 second (1) and, with the help of the Move manipulator, move the car forward (2). In this example, only a translation on the X axis (red one) has been done. If everything goes well, you should see that a keyframe was created in the timeline (3).

First thing to do to the animation is to change the tweener. It's important to take care of this interpolation because it defines the kind of movement and speed between the two keyframes. By default, Carrara creates linear interpolations, meaning that as the object moves from A to B it does so at a constant speed, without increasing and decreasing speed at the beginning and end. This is not natural in 99% of the situations you will animate. Carrara has several kinds of tweeners, and the one we will use is the Bezier tweener. Start by clicking between the two keyframes in the timeline of the car animation (1). The line changes to a yellow color. Next, in the property panel, click on the "Linear" label. In the popup that appears (2) choose Bezier from the list. The new curve in the preview is now more "natural" (3). If we play the animation, the car has now a more natural movement.