Any way to override the maddening "MAIN_CAMERA" plague?
mavante
Posts: 734
Is there any way to override the maddening "MAIN_CAMERA" plague, in which every time you choose to load one of the supplied "cameras" in a product, it erases every other camera you've loaded into the scene or have created yourself, leaving only ONE camera, called "MAIN_CAMERA"? It is utterly maddening behavior, and I cannot conceive any reason for it—OR ANY WAY TO DEFEAT IT! Arrrrrrrrrrrgh! I need to have several camera angles on this scene, set up, animated, and saved with the scene, and I want to use the supplied cameras as starting points for each, but this makes it utterly impossible.
This is the second time I've encountered this, with two different products. I can't right now recall what the first one was, but the current issue is with Predatron's 14MU Outpost, which I've had for a long time, but never used before. And I may not be able to use it now if I can't find a way around this weird, weird, weird behavior.
I've already tried this:
1. Load one of the product's included cameras. We'll call it "Camera_01" ('cause that's what it's called in the Smart Content files). It loads into the Scene tab as "MAIN_CAMERA".
2. Look through the "MAIN CAMERA," then create a new camera, selecting the "Copy active view" option to match the "MAIN_CAMERA."
3. Name my new camera something entirely different, e.g., "My New Camera 1."
4. Double click to load one of the other supplied "cameras."
It not only replaces the "MAIN_CAMERA" with the different location/view; it also DELETES the camera that I created myself! This is, to use a technical term, NUTS!
Does anybody know of any voodoo or hoodoo that can undo this doo-doo? I will greatly—greatly—appreciate any actual solutions. (As for "reasonable explanations" of why a product would erase user-created cameras, under any circumstances—well, not so much.)
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Comments
Save your cameras as a sub set, they will load without deleting what's in the scene.
Ctrl-double click to load (CMD on mac?) and pick option to Add
Thanks, SimonJM. I will try it as soon as I can get into DS again. It's tied up rendering another series right now.
I managed to work out a sort of kicked-in-the-head convoluted work-around by loading each provided "camera," selecting that camera for the viewport view, and creating a spotlight applying that camera's view to the spotlight. Once I had done all six, I selected each such created spotlight in turn for the viewport view, and created a camera for each, applying the relevant spotlight's view for the camera. Then I deleted the accursed "MAIN_CAMERA" for the good of mankind. (Well, at least for the good of me.)
I find it another paroxysm of irony that in both products where I ran into this, the camera-destroying "camera" was called "MAIN_CAMERA." How can you have a "main" anything if there can only be ONE? Should have called it "THE_ONE_AND_ONLY_TRUE_CAMERA."
MAIN_CAMERA is the Poser name for the main camera, so I suspect you are loading Poser camera presets rather than native Daz Studio (which use Default Camera for the default). If so I'm not sure that the cmd(Mac)/ctrl(Win) options work.
Lots of DS camera presets do this, so not only poser content.
Yes? DS will use the .duf version in preference. I don't recall Poser cameras actually loading very well, though I think they did better than lights.