Automatic Generation of Camera Motion to Track a Moving Guide

Manually following a moving object through a cluttered virtual environment can be challenging for the user. Instead, one would typically rather focus on watching the object and its environment. In this paper, we present an approach to automatically generate a camera motion, such that the user maintains visibility with an object moving along a known path through a virtual environment. To begin, the user specifies the camera placement at the start and end of the object path, and constraints on the camera placement relative to the object. Given this input, the system computes a smooth camera path, satisfying the constraints: Firstly, an initial camera path is generates by applying a single-shot probabilistic road map technique. We augmented this technique with several optimisations, speeding up the path generation considerably. Then, the initial path is smoothed to present the user with a pleasant camera motion. The approach has been implemented and tested: it is fast and computes paths through complicated 2D and 3D environments in less than a second.