Camera Overview

The camera tab controls the way the scene geometry is projected onto the image. Note that if you use the VRayPhysicalCamera in your scene, most of the parameters in this section are ignored, with the exception of the camera Type and some of the motion blur parameters.

Camera Type

The cameras in V-Ray generally define the rays that are cast into the scene, which essentially is how the scene is projected onto the screen. V-Ray supports several camera types: Standard, Spherical, Cylindrical (point), Cylindrical (ortho), Box, Fish eye, Warped spherical, Orthogonal and Pinhole.

Type - from this list you can select the type of the camera. See the Examples below for a more detailed discussion on camera types.

• Standard - this is a standard pinhole camera.
• Spherical - this is a spherical camera which means that the camera lenses has spherical form.
• Cylindrical (point) - with this type of camera all rays have a common origin - they are cast from the center of the cylinder. In the vertical direction the camera acts as a pinhole camera and in the horizontal direction it acts as a spherical camera.
• Cylindrical (ortho) - in vertical direction the camera acts as an orthographic view and in the horizontal direction it acts as a spherical camera.
• Box - the box camera is simply 6 standard cameras placed on the sides of a box. This type of camera is excellent for generation of environment maps for cube mapping. It may be very useful for GI too - you can calculate the irradiance map with a Box camera, save it to file and you can reuse it with a Standard camera that can be pointed at any direction.
• Fish eye - this special type of camera captures the scene as if it is normal pinhole camera pointed at an absolutely reflective sphere which reflects the scene into the camera's shutter. You can use the Distance/FOV settings to control what part of the sphere will be captured by the camera. The red arc in the diagram corresponds to the FOV angle. Note that the sphere has always a radius of 1.0.
• Warped spherical - another spherical camera with slightly different mapping formula.
• Orthogonal - This mode allows us to do an orthographic projection of the scene. It is a form of parallel projection, where all the projection lines are orthogonal to the projection plane, resulting in every plane of the scene appearing in affine transformation on the viewing surface. In simple terms this is a mode of rendering the scene into a engineering drawing.
• Pinhole - this mode simulates a simple camera that has a very small aperture and no lens - basically a box with a tiny hole. Light from the scene can only pass through that small hole and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box. This is how first cameras operated. When this mode is used everything in the scene is on focus, i.e. depth of field is infinite.

Override FOV - with this setting you can override the Softimage's FOV angle. This is because some V-Ray camera types can take FOV ranges from 0 to 360 degrees, whereas the cameras in Softimage are limited to 180 degrees.

Auto-fit - this setting controls the auto-fit option of the Fish-eye camera. When Auto-fit is enabled V-Ray will calculate the Distance value automatically so that the rendered image fits horizontally with the image's dimensions.

FOV - here you specify the FOV angle (only when Override FOV is turned on and the current camera type supports FOV angle).

Distance - this setting applies only to the Fish-eye camera. The Fish-eye camera is simulated as a Standard camera pointed to an absolutely reflective sphere (with a radius of 1.0) that reflects the scene into the camera's shutter. The Distance value controls how far the camera is from the sphere's center (which is how much of the sphere will be captured by the camera). Note: this setting has no effect when the Auto-fit option is enabled.

Height - here you can specify the height of the Cylindrical (ortho) camera. This setting is available only when the Type is set to Cylindrical (ortho).

Curve - this setting applies only to the Fish-eye camera. This setting contorts the way the rendered image is warped. A value of 1.0 corresponds to a real world Fish-eye camera. As the value approaches 0.0 the warping is increased. As the value approaches 2.0 the warping is reduced. Note: in fact this value controls the angle at which rays are reflected by the virtual sphere of the camera.

Depth of Field

These parameters control the depth of field effect when rendering with a standard Softimage camera. The parameters are ignored if you render from a VRayPhysicalCamera.

On - enables or disables the calculations of the Depth of field effect.

Aperture - this is the size of the virtual camera aperture, in world units. Small aperture sizes reduce the DOF effect.

Sides - this option allows you to simulate the polygonal shape of the aperture of real-world cameras. When this option is off, the shape is assumed to be perfectly circular. The number on the right controls how many sides the polygonal shape of the aperture has.

Center bias - this determines the uniformity of the DOF effect. A value of 0.0 means that light passes uniformly through the aperture. Positive values mean that light is concentrated towards the rim of the aperture, while negative values concentrate light at the center.

Rotation - specifies the orientation of the aperture shape.

Focal distance - determines the distance from the camera at which objects will be in perfect focus. Objects closer or farther than that distance will be blurred.

Anisotropy - this option allows the stretching of the bokeh effect horizontally or vertically. Positive values stretch the effect in the vertical direction. Negative values stretch it in the horizontal direction.

Get from camera - when this option is on, the Focal distance is determined from the camera target.

Subdivisions - controls the quality of the DOF effect. Lower values are computed faster, but produce more noise in the image. Higher values smooth out the noise, but take more time to render. Note that the quality of sampling also depends on the settings of the DMC Sampler as well as on the chosen Image sampler.

Clipping Planes

Enable - when this option is on clipping planes used by Softimage camera will be considered

Notes

• Depth of field is supported only for the Standard camera type. Other camera types do not produce depth of field effect at this time.
• When DOF and motion blur are both enabled, they are sampled together using the higher of the two Subdivs parameters.