Question about Camera Size
I have some environments that are a little small. I have toyed with re-sizing them so they are a little bit bigger but sometimes that makes them look a little wonky. Would making my camera smaller have any significant impact on the render? I tried it once and it seemed okay but I just thought I'd ask to see if there were any hidden pitfalls in doing that.
Thanks for any info!
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No, the important part of the camera is just its hot-spot - the centre point, at which the gizmo is placed. As long as the camera is inside you will see the interior, but you may have a limited field of view - lowering the camera's Focal Length will help, but will distort things (heading towards a fish-eye effect). If you are using Iray you can place the camera outside and use an Iray Section Plane (from the Create menu) to hide the nearer walls (efectively how film sets work); if you select the plane and turn on the Clip Lights parameters your lights and rflections wills till treat the space as if it's enclosed, should you want that.
I did a render the other day where I took part of a scene, including the camera, and reduced the scale to about 10%. Everything worked fine, except when I was doing DOF. I switched to Perspective View to try to line up the focus right, but when the markings indicated I was spot-on, the image was way out of focus. I had to use the Iray preview to set the focus, and then everything worked.
Not sure if that was caused by shrinking the camera, though. It could be the way perspective view dealt with the way I zoomed in.
Thanks both of you, that was helpful.
Cezjuan...what is the Iray Preview? The only way I know how to "preview" anything is to do a spot render. Anything that allows me to ID a problem before rendering sounds kinda wonderful to me.
If you click the sphere icon at top-right of the viewport, next to the button for picking camera/view, you will get a list of preview modes - including one using Iray (default shortcut ctrl/cmd 0). Its options are set, when it is active, in the Draw Settings pane.
I do this in the aux viewport generally as it gives a quick iray render, but you can also do it in the main viewport. I really like this when I am working on the scene lighting, because I can move a light or change the settings and get an (almost) instant view of what the change does to the scene, rather than waiting for either a spot render or a full on test.
he only caveat I will put on this is that before I upgraded to a decent video card, using the Iray preview in any viewport really slowed my system down as it would use the CPU. I now have a GeForce gtx 1070 and that really sped things up.
I tried this last night and it turned everything in the scene white. Is the purpose of this to show lighting/shadows? I guess I'm fuzzy on what it's used for.
The scene will show in smooth shaded mode while it is being prepared to render, then it will show an Iray render (with some limitations). If your hardware is limited it can take a while to appear in rendered mode, and of course it will need to refresh when you make changes to poses or materials or lights.
Ahhh okay. I didn't wait for it to do anything. It did take a minute (Program Not Responding) before it changed into smooth shaded. I just freaked out and put it back to how it was. And I do run a little slow with my 960 GPU. Thanks Richard.