How to center a camera in a room or space to view the room 360?

nowefg

I'm working with KindredArts wonderful Harwood House environment. Very well thought out set, lots of rooms, prop groups, lights and cameras to work with. Fantastic.

But I would like to be able to go into the rooms and look around. Using the universal camera rotate widget with any of the included cameras immediately zooms me right out the house.

So I create a null in the center of a room, create a camera, and parent the camera to the null. Not bad. I can look around the room 360 by rotating the null, but if I rotate that camera directly with the widget, I still zoom out of the house. So rotating the null does work, but it's tedious fiddling with 3 rotation sliders to see a particular angle.

That's what I use the universal camera widget for. It's a very fast and intuitive way to view a scene. What I need is a way to center a camera in a room, so I can use the widget to view the room 360.

I've looked at, and fiddled with Camera parameters, wanting to affect the point around which a camera will rotate when using the widget, but without success so far.

Hopefully I'm missing something obvious?

algovincian

nowefg said:

I'm working with KindredArts wonderful Harwood House environment. Very well thought out set, lots of rooms, prop groups, lights and cameras to work with. Fantastic.

But I would like to be able to go into the rooms and look around. Using the universal camera rotate widget with any of the included cameras immediately zooms me right out the house.

So I create a null in the center of a room, create a camera, and parent the camera to the null. Not bad. I can look around the room 360 by rotating the null, but if I rotate that camera directly with the widget, I still zoom out of the house. So rotating the null does work, but it's tedious fiddling with 3 rotation sliders to see a particular angle.

That's what I use the universal camera widget for. It's a very fast and intuitive way to view a scene. What I need is a way to center a camera in a room, so I can use the widget to view the room 360.

I've looked at, and fiddled with Camera parameters, wanting to affect the point around which a camera will rotate when using the widget, but without success so far.

Hopefully I'm missing something obvious?

If I'm understanding what you want to do correctly, locking the camera's X, Y, and Z Translations in the Parameters tab should make it stay put while still allowing you to look around with the widget.

HTH.

- Greg

nowefg

Yes. Simple. Thank you.

Richard Haseltine

Rotating a camera should rotate it in place, unless it has Point At on.

Sven Dullah

Use right mouse button to rotate camera without moving it!

algovincian

Sven Dullah said:

Use right mouse button to rotate camera without moving it!

Great tip, Sven! I've been using DS for around 10 years now, so you think I would have known this by now, but I didn't lol

- Greg

crosswind

OP wanna use Rotate rather than Orbit ?

Sven Dullah

algovincian said:

Sven Dullah said:

Use right mouse button to rotate camera without moving it!

Great tip, Sven! I've been using DS for around 10 years now, so you think I would have known this by now, but I didn't lol

- Greg

Right-clicking is underrated LOL. It's always great to stumble upon these kinds of things that make life a tad easier.

Regarding orbiting - if a camera is parented to something, orbiting it will most likely swing it into another parallell universe. Either parent it to a null or group and rotate that, or unparent the camera, set focal distance to the distance of the object you want to orbit, and go ahead;)