Week 7 Class Practical: Part 1 - Cameras

Cameras in Maya are used in 2 different ways. The default cameras that are setup by Maya are used as ways of seeing your model from different viewing angles but we can also create addition cameras for use in production (rendering) that have attributes that can be adjusted. These cameras can also be animated to create sweeping shots of our scene/models. When creating cameras, there are a few different types to talk about.

Camera

The basic camera is the same camera used in all of the default viewports of Maya. Like with any camera, you can change the focal length (this affects the field of view, almost like a fish eye lens), the clipping planes (the max distance the camera can see) amongst other attributes. 

Camera and Aim

Camera and Aim gives you an additional gizmo that allows you to direct the focal point of the camera at all times. This has lots of uses when it comes to animating a scene, like easily creating a sweeping camera perspective by moving the camera with a fixed focal point.

Camera, Aim and Up

This camera is similar to the last camera, but it has an extra gizmo representing the cameras fixed Y position. This camera allows for some interesting camera angles when sweeping from the left/right while the fixed "up" position stays the same, as shown below.

To better learn how cameras work and the various customisation options available with them, the class worksheet has suggested we create a scene showing a few features of the camera object. To demonstrate the various camera options, I created a scene with set of shapes present, as shown below.

First, I will be showing an example of the camera focal length. This attribute will widen the view of a camera with an effect similar to a fish eye lens. The default focal length value for a camera is 35, but I have changed it to 10. This gives the camera the effect of being much further away from the object without moving the actual position of the camera, but if you look at the grid on the floor you can see how the effect is "stretching" the view out into the distance. Below you can see a before and after picture with the effect applied.

Next, I will show the effect of the clipping plane. This effect is the same as "culling" found in modern video games. Essentially you are defining a minimum (near clip) and maximum (far clip) range at which the camera will render anything in view. Anything outside of this range will be omitted from the cameras view but still exists in the world space. This is used to reduce resources used when rendering a scene. The default value for this attribute on all cameras is a far clip plane of 10000. Below is a before and after picture, where I have change the camera's far clipping plane from 10000 to 25.

The final part of camera attributes I will be covering is the "Film Back" properties. There are a large number of attributes you can change in here that effect the physical representation of the camera, such as the aperture size, aspect ratio and overscan settings. The overscan option multiplies the film aperture in order to compensate for camera shake while "recording". This means that a larger area is rendered than without overscan, allowing for adjustment later. Below is a before and after picture of a camera set up to match the attributes of an Imax camera, with a 2 times multiplier for camera shake overscan applied to it.

This post only scratches the surface of what cameras can offer to a scene. I will be experimenting more with camera attributes while creating my animation in the coming weeks.