I have animated a camera by creating a dummy and a spline. I have used the spline as a path constraint and then linked a camera to the dummy.

When I create an animation the camera is shaky as if it is on an old shaky bus or something.

Does anybody have any idea whets causing this and how I can prevent it.

3DS Max 2013
8gb Ram
Intel i7

!st thing I would try is to select the Spline, expand the Interpolation Rollout, uncheck “Optimise” and increase the Steps value.

Note that there’s a limit of 100 steps, so if this is a very long path it might pay to break it into several shorter splines (each with their own dummy) and use the Attachment Constraint to “hand” the camera from one dummy to the next (instead of the Select and Link).

Max 4.2 through 2013.
XP-64 (SP2)
NVidia 9800GTX-512 (Driver 266.58).
Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, 8Gb Ram, DX9.0c.

I assume you are doing a simple camera move? If so , unless you really have to use a spline as a path constraint, I would advise not using path constraints.

I know in the earlier tutorials they show you how to do camera moves with path constraints but they are really not very good. I would animate the camera with just keyframes because it allows greater freedom and power. You can use the graph editor to smooth things out and therefore avoid these shakiness.

Hope this helps.

3DS Max 6 to 2009, Maya 2010
Windows XP Pro x64 SP2
NVIDIA Quadro 1700, Quad Core 2.67GHz, 4Gb RAM
http://www.beanboxanimation.co.uk

Thank you for your feed back.

The path was to complex to manually animate the camera. The solution that worked was to move the whole model to the origin

3DS Max 2013
8gb Ram
Intel i7