Adding random camera motion to your scene might seem like an easy thing. It’s hard to get something that looks random enough to be believable. In the end getting that handheld camera look might take a few tries. In Maya, the camera has a camera shake attribute that will allow you to connect anything to it. This way it can be pretty easy to control shake procedurally by way of a texture for example. There are also scripts that let you animate shake effectively.
If your scene has a simple camera move that tracks the action, there is a fairly easy way to add some sake to that camera track to achieve a more natural handheld camera look. Why not just constrain the camera to the hips of the character? Animator Paul Creamer shows how you can set this up. Creamer shows how you can bake the effects of the constraint on the “3’s” and then make some adjustments to the graph to get a nice, random looking handheld camera shake going.
If you feel that your camera is too static, this is a quick way to get some extra motion simply by constraining and adjusting. Nice tip!
