Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie we're going to take a look at some of the Camera Properties before we get into actually using the cameras to navigate 3D space. The Properties Palette is very important for the cameras because it gives you some options that you have in typical real world cameras. To engage that you come down and simply in the Properties or the Instances portion of the Properties Palette select a camera by clicking on it. And I need to, I guess, show something that's really important before we get into that. On the top of each one of these panes that we have open right here you'll see a description of what camera you're looking through, so on the large vertical one, Camera 1, then we've got our Top, our Left Camera, we can Insert more cameras into our scene, and will have the ability to choose them. Well, how do you choose them? If you click and hold, or just click on the description of the camera you get some options that pop up. This allows you to quickly actually change between the camera in that scene and another one, so if I wanted to view this scene from the Right Side I could select that and it changes that easily. I can come back to Camera 1. Now, Camera 1, or anything with the official name Camera at the beginning is a camera you can render your animation or final images through. The problem is, is that you need to move around your scene sometimes and we need another camera to do that with so we don't change the position of our original camera. We also maybe would want to lock our camera in place so that we don't lose some careful positioning that we have set up. There's another option down here called Directors Camera, and if we switch to this camera we get a different view that allows us to move around our scenes. We'll come back to this in more detail as we work with the camera movements. However, I'm going to come back to Camera 1, I'm going to move to a One View, and we'll now take a look at the Properties. The reason I bring this up is because the Director Camera has no properties to work with, so you don't have the flexibility of doing with the Directors Camera what we're going to be doing with the Properties of Camera 1 right now. With Camera 1 selected in our Instances Palette we can change the name of it so the way I usually do this is that if I've got multiple cameras here I'll say change that to Camera Render 1, part of our Best Method, so that all the names make sense. We've got the ability to have it visible or hide it in the scene. You're saying, why would we even want to hide it? When you get multiple cameras for a scene where you might have a close up camera for one rendering and another one further away or one that's moving, it can really clutter up your scene. Using Visible On or Off hides the camera. Now you'll notice I just clicked Visible Off Ð we're on Camera 1 Ð and we're still looking through Camera 1. One of the manifestations of doing this is if we come up to our View Window, come down to Show Production Frame, sometimes the Production Frame will show and sometimes it won't, and it looks a little off-center because our view here where I just clicked is 134 percent, thanks to the Zoom Tool that we used in the last movie, so I'm going to hold down the Option key on the Mac, Alt key on the PC, and click once in the center of that little window. I can click and drag right around this Production Frame to get centered back in the window. Now this is not a camera zoom; it's not physically moving the camera in and out of the scene, it's just allowing you to do a close up. So, now with that done, we'll come back to our Camera. We've got the Visibility turned On and off and we can Animate it or choose not to Animate it here. I'll leave the Visibility turned On. Know that on some systems that when you turn Visibility off this Production Frame does disappear. We've got some options, too, under our Camera. Right now it's Conical, and think of a conical camera as your basic 35 millimeter camera that has a standard lens. Conical means that as you get further away from the camera the picture field gets larger. It's just like a little cone where it's very small next to the camera but as you, you know, get further away, like a mile away, you can see several miles in your viewfinder, that's a conical camera. We've got an Isometric Camera that we can choose, and this eliminates all perspective in your scene so it's just like a draftsman or architectural render, or even some of like those three-quarters or isometric game play that you've got, where there's no perspective you can tell something's further back in space because it covers up other items, but there is no perspective. And then we get a very wacky camera called Spherical. When you switch to Spherical everything looks normal in your scene. The Spherical Camera, however, is used to create complete 360 in all direction of renders, so while the camera looks correct now if I go ahead and do a quick render, go over to our Render Room and do Render, we get the very, even if we do a Preview the Preview looks fine, if we do a Render we're going to get something that looks quite different and that is because of how the scene's set up. We'll get to that in some of our advanced sections later on. So I'm going to come back to Conical Camera. We've got the ability to do a Wide Angle Lens to capture more of the environment just like a real lens. The Normal is 50 millimeter, which is a film camera millimeter version. We've got Telephoto, which is like doing a long shot. That has a tendency to force perspective out of the scene, a common trick that's used for shooting down streets with movies, but what if you wanted to imitate a 35 millimeter camera? There are reasons why you would want to do that or imitate another camera. If you're combining photography with your 3D scene you need to match the actual focal length or the millimeter qualities of the camera lens. If I wanted to do a 35 millimeter lens then what I would do is click the Zoom option here, but instead change this to 35 millimeters. One way I can do that is to drag down here just a little bit to 35, or I can enter that directly in there by typing the numbers 35 and pressing Enter. This will imitate the lens quality of a standard real world camera. Other options that are here, we can Hide in the 3D View the Camera, but under Effects we've got a special feature also for Depth of Field. This is something where it's just like setting the F-stop in a camera where you can have certain things in focus, certain things out of focus Ð we'll deal with that much more as we get into other movies. So there is the basics of dealing with the Camera Properties. Let's go ahead and take a look at how we work with the Cameras and maneuver them through the scenes.