Creating a Camera Rig in Blender

I recently finished a 3D dragon model as part of my Advanced Modelling unit; I wanted to show him off as part of my portfolio and showreel so decided to learn how to set up a camera rig in Blender that could take a 360 shot of him.

I looked up a couple of different YouTube videos on Blender camera rigs including this one:

(Youtube.com. 2022. [online] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K02hlKyoWNI> [Accessed 16 February 2022])

From doing a bit of research I was able to set up a working camera rig in Blender that would loop my 3D model. I started by adding a standard Bezier circle into my scene, I scaled this up to suit the scale of my model and added a Y axis rotation in order to get a low angle in front of the dragon's face and high angle looking down at the tail detail at the back. I also made the circle more of an oval by scaling up along the x axis in order to get a longer shot of the front and rear.

I then added in an empty cube (this doesn't get rendered but is used a a prop object to parent other objects to) and a camera. I would normally look into adding a lighting setup to accommodate for the moving camera but in this instance my HDR map offered enough light. I parented the camera to the cube empty and set it to run along the bezier path.

I checked the shot composition from several angles using numberpad 0 and once I was happy I set up a render folder for the output PNGs. Using cycles for a higher quality render, I started the process and waited for results.