The ScoobyCam Expression
The Scooby Path Creator
ScoobyCamTools is by by German developer Frank Willeke a.k.a. C4D-Jack. The first version of the ScoobyCamTools started in 2004 during the work of a student movie project. In this movie there was a mix of real footage and CG elements. Within this movie there was a need for a CG camera that could simulate the motion of a real camera. Thus version 1 of ScoobyCamTools was born, although it was very primitive and consisted only some simple XPresso nodes. Now after almost 4 years since V1, V4.00.28 is released and is far more advanced than V1 and it contains a lot of very handy and clever options.
The plugin can be downloaded from the plugin developer's site here. It is 1.3Mb in size.
After paying £49.90, the license key will be sent to you via E-Mail. The installation is very easy, just unpack the files into your Plugin folder along with the license key as well.
ScoobyCamTools is a plugin for CINEMA 4D TM that provides a number of functions to simulate the behavior of a hand held camera (video camera, cell phone camera etc.) That includes the shaking and jiggling, swinging as well as the delayed and imprecise targeting. In other words, when using ScoobyCamTools with a CINEMA 4D camera, it will look like you're looking through the eyes of the cameraman including the shaking motion etc and will give the viewer a very natural feeling.
The ScoobyCamTools consists of the following components. (Larger images of tags)
| |
The ScoobyCam Expression | The Scooby Path Creator |
The ScoobyCam expression Tag must be attached to a normal CINEMA 4D Camera. In the settings for this tag you can set the behavior of the camera. Later on in this review we will dive deeper into the settings and options for this tag.
The Scooby Path Creator is an object that can create a path for your camera to follow. It will create a spline along any number of objects and can be projected onto geometry. You even can use this object for spline modeling, like any other spline e.g. cables that lie on a rough surface or a moving snake.
First we need a scene where we want the camera moving through. The image below is a very simple scene setup I have prepared.
 |
Sample scene |
After this we start with the actual ScoobyCam plugin. You need to add a CINEMA 4D camera to the scene. Be sure to look through this camera in the viewport and add a ScoobyCam Expression tag to the Camera. The tag can be found just any other tags in CINEMA 4D. Just right click on the camera in the object manager and choose the ScoobyCam tag.
 |
ScoobyCam tag |
After adding this tag, the camera will be set to the 0.0.0 in the coordinates. Next thing is to setup is the Camera Height and Parallax Offset according the size of your scene. You can set this in the attributes manager of the ScoobyCam tag.
 |
ScoobyCam tag attributes |
Default Camera Height is set to 1.50m height and default Parallax Offset is set to 3cm. For this review I set the height to be that of an average Dutch man. That is 1.85m or 185cm in my case. Now when you press the play button, the camera will move.(The camera will stay put until we set up motion path. More on this soon)
Without setting a motion for the camera it won't be very exciting to watch. On the Motion tab in the attributes manager we can simulate all kinds of behaviors e.g. steps, shaking, shivering rolling and wiggling of the virtual cameraman. The 3 top sliders can be seen as the master sliders and can be used to set the strength of the motions from 0% to 100%. When it is set to 0% there will no motion at all. Further you can set the Position, Rotation, Dependency and a Manual rotation. All of the sliders can be animated like normal. We can make use of a spline curve setting as well. You will need to play around with these settings quite a bit to fully understand how it all works, but after a while you will get the hang of it and you will be able to quickly setup a nice motion for your camera.
 |
ScoobyCam tag attributes - Motion tab |
Review by C4D Cafe © 2008