From the course: 3ds Max 2024 Essential Training

Creating a Physical Camera and Target - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2024 Essential Training

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Creating a Physical Camera and Target

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In this chapter we'll learn the essentials of cameras in Max. We need a camera if we're going to export or render images out to disk. There are three types of cameras in Max. There's the original camera type, which is sometimes called standard. There's a physical camera, which is a better approximation of the optics of a real-world camera. And there are also Arnold cameras. We're only going to be looking at the 3ds Max cameras in this course. I covered the Arnold camera in another course which is 3ds Max Rendering with Arnold. We can create cameras from the Create panel. Cameras have their own category. Click on the Cameras button. And we have a pull-down list here that's labeled Standard. If you click on that you could access the Arnold cameras. Let's go back up to Standard. For the 3ds Max cameras we have two options, even though there are three buttons here. there's actually only two types of cameras. There's the standard camera and the physical camera. Either one of those could have a target or not. A target is a look-at point. The camera's always gonna look at its target. We can move that target around in order to rotate the camera and have it look in different places in the scene. So we can have a physical camera that has a target or no target, which would be a free physical camera. or we could have a standard camera that has a target or no target which would be a free standard camera. So the target button and the free button here either one of those will create a standard camera and you can choose to turn the target on or off after you've created the camera. The physical button here will always create a targeted physical camera and if you want to get rid of that target, again you can turn it off later. But you're always going to create a target when you create a physical camera. So let's do it. We'll click on the physical button. Go over to the top view because the view in which we create the camera is really important. If we want the camera to be aligned in a conventional way we want to create that camera in the top view or the perspective view. Click and hold the mouse button down. When you click you've determined the position for the camera. Holding the mouse button, drag out and you're setting the position for the target or look at point. Release the mouse and you've created that camera and its target. Right click to exit creation mode. The camera and its target are created at the construction plane of the currently selected viewport. In this case it means we've created the camera and its target at the XY plane of the world with a Z elevation of zero. you can see in the Perspective view, it's sitting right on the ground. We want to move it up. Now we could move either the camera or its target up, but if we move them one at a time we would introduce a tilt. So the camera and the target wouldn't be at the same elevation and the camera would be looking up or down. If you want to move both the camera and its target, we can select the line that joins the two of them. Grab the Move tool, click on that line in the top viewport, We'll go over to the left view and right-click so we don't lose our selection. Click and drag on the Y-axis of the Move Gizmo to position that up, and move it up to let's say about 1.5 meters in the Y-axis of the viewport, which is the Z-axis of the world. That's positioned roughly where I want it. Now let's look through that camera in order to see what it sees. We only have four viewports here, and we're going to need to actually sacrifice one of them. Because I want to keep this perspective view, it's important. It's giving me the sort of objective viewpoint of the scene, not through the subjective viewpoint of the camera lens. We could think of this as being the director's point of view. The director can see the camera within the set. We also need to see through the camera lens, as it were. So we're gonna have to sacrifice one of these viewports. I don't need the front viewport as much as I need the other ones. So let's load the camera into the front viewport. Click on the viewport's name or its label, which is front, and from that pop-up menu choose cameras. And any cameras that we've created will be listed here. There's only one. Fiz camera 001. Select that, and now we're seeing what that camera sees. We can go into a shaded mode with F3. To change the framing, we can do this in several different ways. First let's look at what I call a third-person method in which we manipulate the camera or its target in a different viewport. We can go over to the top view for example, select the camera and position it and we can see that it's always going to point at its look at point or target and we can see that we're moving in this sort of complex orbit in our scene. Or we can select the target and then move it. And this is equivalent to panning in our scene. OK, so that's pretty cool. If we want to move the camera towards or away in a dolly movement, then we'll want to switch to local coordinates. Because if I select the camera and position it so that its target line is at a diagonal relative to the world grid. It's kind of difficult for me to move the camera directly towards or away from its target using the gizmo or manipulator. So let's just switch over to local coordinates from the reference coordinate system pulldown choose local and now the move gizmo is aligned with the camera itself so we can get a smooth dolly movement. And finally if you want to change the field of view, or the angle of view, to get a wide angle or a tight angle shot. You'll do that from the modify panel. With the camera selected, go to the modify panel, and you've got the physical camera parameters, and within there we have the lens parameters. This is set up in order to emulate the way a real camera works with an actual sensor that has a physical size and also a focal length, which is the effective distance between that sensor and the lens. Okay, well that's great if you wanted to, for example, match your 3ds Max rendering to an existing photograph or motion picture. And if you were to do that, then you would set up the sensor size and the focal length appropriately to match your real-world camera. But in most cases, in a pure CGI workflow, we probably just want to change the field of view, or angle of view, to get a wide angle or a tight shot. To do that, turn on the switch that's labeled Specify FOV. Click that checkbox, and now we have a degree field, and we can click and drag on that to see what happens. We can use that to zoom out or zoom in. So for an architectural rendering like this, I probably want a wide angle shot. Let's give it a field of view of 80 degrees. All right, that's the essentials of setting up a physical camera.

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