Creating a smooth animation path

[plot-paris]

I am working on a fligh-through animation at the moment. the camera is supposed to spiral down on the buildings. therefore I created several scenes at different points of the animation. I then connected these camera positions with a smooth curve.

can't really remember how I did it. somehow messed arround with bezier curves and the ffd tool. but it was a real pain to get the tangents right and still pass through the defined points.

so my first question is:
is there an easy and elegant way to create a path with smoothe transitions (in all three coorinate directions) that precisely goes through pre-defined points?

my path is stitched together of several seperate curves, using the weld plugin. then I discovered, that flightpath2 calculates it's pace according to the vertex distribution of the curve, meaning: loads of vertexes = slow movement, few vertexes = fast movement.
because my path was stitched together of bezier curves with completely different vertex numbers, the first half of my animation took 3 seconds, the second half 3 minutes.

you can't define the vertex number of welded curves. therefore I intersected a grit of vertical planes with the curve to manually create a path with almost even vertex distribution - very tedious and time consuming.

therefore my second question is:
is there a way to define the number/distribution of vertexes on a welded curve?

perhaps there is a ruby that I am not aware of, that does something like this...

or even better would be if you could define a steady increase/decrease of segment distribution throughout the curve...

If anyone has some ideas or tips, it would be highly appreciated

[Frederik]

Haven't we already had a similar discussion in the Which rubies for better camera movement in animations? thread, where both you and I have talked about Interpolation ..??

[plot-paris]

oh yeah, I forgot about this thread

but in this particular case my problem is a lot more down to earth. now I know that I will use the ruby "flightpath2".

all I have to do now is to find out how to create a smooth curve with even vertex distribution - so its all about modeling.

[kwistenbiebel]

Maybe the 'Bezierspline' plugin could help you out as you can define the number of sections.
That toolbar plugin (made by Fredo6) has a lot of options to make curves/beziers/splines etc...

Lookie lookie here: http://www.crai.archi.fr/RubyLibraryDepot/Ruby/en_edi_page.htm

[plot-paris]

thats what I tried to do. perhaps I should learn tools before using them

I was not able to snap the control points of a bezier curve precisely to the camera position points. perhaps I should have closer look at the tools provided by fredo.

will let you know, if I have success with that.

[Edit]
ok, as far as I understand it, it is only possible to draw these bezier curves on a plane, but not in 3 dimensional space. so it doesn't work for me when I try to connect camera-positions that differ in height.

please correct me, if I am wrong (I would very much like being wrong on this matter )
[/Edit]