Simple Turn arounds in Blender

In today’s quick tip you’ll learn how to make a cam­era move around your object. This can be used to cre­ate cool sweeps and more visu­al inter­est to a shot.

1. Create an emp­ty and give it a descrip­tive name like “Camera Control”. Position it over your object, remem­ber our cam­era will point to this empty.

2. Select your cam­era, go to the prop­er­ties pan­el and add a “Track To” con­strain. In the con­strain set­tings select the emp­ty as your tar­get, make sure “Up” is Y and “To” is ‑Z. By adding this con­strain we make sure the cam­era will always face our empty.

3. Select the cam­era and then the emp­ty, then go to Object > Parent > Object (or press Ctrl+P) to par­ent the cam­era to the emp­ty. Now you can rotate the emp­ty and the cam­era will fol­low it’s rotation!

You can also scale the emp­ty to move the cam­era clos­er, or move it to change the point of interest.