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I'd like to make an animation of some objects moving around on flat plane which stretches to the horizon:

enter image description here

Then I'd like to move the camera waaaayyyy into the sky and show that the ground is actually a text object. I'm finding the difference in scales really tough to work on in a single scene (e.g. clipping is driving me nuts).

Is it possible to do the described shot in a single scene? Or am I better off splitting it into two scenes and somehow stitch the animation back together in the video sequence editor?

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  • $\begingroup$ related: blender.stackexchange.com/questions/23787/… $\endgroup$
    – user1853
    Commented Apr 12, 2015 at 22:11
  • $\begingroup$ I've decided to go for two separate scenes. Merging them might be OK for this case, but I can certainly imagine wanting continuous scale variation at some point (e.g. microscopic, zoom out to the microscope, soom out over the building, zoom out over the planet, zoom out over the galaxy...) $\endgroup$
    – ajwood
    Commented Apr 15, 2015 at 0:20

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Why not drive the scale of the objects as an inverse function to the distance of the camera? That way the camera doesn't have to move as far while the objects take up less room.

You can add drivers to the objects that you want scaled. They should take the local location of the camera and divide it into 1. Resulting in a smaller value for the scene. In fact if there are many objects then i would parent them to an empty and simply drive it's scale.

Here are the drivers with the function attached:

enter image description here

Remember to copy this driver to each channel for uniform scaling.

finally remember that any materials that exist in world space will not scale with the UVs of the objects.

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    $\begingroup$ That's pretty ingenious. But, so that every one reading can understand your suggestion, you should expand your post to contain how. $\endgroup$
    – someonewithpc
    Commented Apr 21, 2015 at 7:27
  • $\begingroup$ Please do. Scale is a bugaboo in many instances. Knowing how to "drive the scale of the objects...camera" would be very helpful. $\endgroup$
    – NeverGiveUp
    Commented Apr 21, 2015 at 13:32
  • $\begingroup$ Sadly all I seem to achieve is inverting the child objects. Unfortunately I just don't know how to return a normalised rational number, as multiplying by -1 is just an inverse function. There just doesn't seem to be an Modify Transform via constraints or driver. Although a driver might achieve it. I tried to use bones driven from camera location. Failing that you could just do it manually. $\endgroup$
    – 3pointedit
    Commented Apr 22, 2015 at 13:11

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