Screen-Space Constraints for Camera Movements: the Virtual Cameraman

This article presents a virtual cameraman which allows us to obtain the whole set of camera movements satisfying user defined constraints specified in the image space and/or constraints on the objects of the scene. This research follows the "Declarative Modelling" approach, which focuses on a 3-phase modeller concept: description; generation; result exploration.

Our tool is based on a solver using interval arithmetic. The time dimension is treated as another variable, thus constraints can be specified for the total duration of the animation or could last only for a given amount of time. There is no keyframing and no interpolation, thereby, for the solutions obtained, the satisfaction of the specified constraints are guaranteed. Several ways to include time dimension efficiently are discussed.

We claim that the method is simple enough to be implemented easily without the need of any external solver.