CameraΒΆ

Cameras are either used to navigate through the scene or to setup the rendering viewpoint of an image, or both.

Orthographic cameras

Orthographic are used to manipulate the 3d scene, pick and move objects. Yet, they should not be used as rendering viewpoint, as they can't produce a physically correct rendering of a scene.

By default, Guerilla creates 6 orthographic cameras, named Top, Bottom, Left, Right, Front and Back.

Perspective cameras

Perspective cameras can be used for rendering. They come in many flavours, such as monoscopic or stereoscopic, minimalistic or Maya compliant.

Creating and using a simple camera

Select the Create > Create Camera menu item. Edit the camera specific parameters in the Camera tab of its properties.

Creating a Maya compliant camera

Select the Create > Create Maya Camera menu item. Edit the camera specific parameters in the Maya Camera tab of its properties.

Maya Cameras have more parameters, such as Focal Length, Aperture, Film Offset, Film Gate, ... When exporting a scene fron Maya, the Guerilla Exporter creates a Maya Camera for all cameras of the Maya scene. When importing an Alembic file, the Alembic importer translates all cameras into Maya Camers.

Viewing from a camera

To view the scene through a camera, you can either:

  • Press over the camera in the viewport and choose Look Through
  • Drag and drop the camera from the Node List or the Node Browser to a viewport
  • Select the camera from the View > Set View > Viewport (> Cameras)

Depth of Field

You can set perspective cameras to render with depth of field. In the Depth of Field tab of the camera properties, adjust Field Distance to the desired in focus plane, and Field Factor to change the amount of blur.

You can easily adjust those parameters by looking through the camera and enabling AntiAliasing in the viewport.

Stereoscopy

Any perspective camera can be turned into a stereoscopic camera, simply by adjusting its stereoscopic parameters.

Setting a simple stereoscopic camera

In the Stereoscopy tab of the camera, adjust the Eye Distance and the Screen Distance. Setting the Eye Distance to 0 disable the camera stereoscopy.

You can freely choose the convergence mode in Stereo Mode, either:

  • Frustum Skew performs planar convergent
  • Parallel doesn't converge at all
  • Convergent rotates the left and right camera pivots so they converge at the correct distance

You can also choose how left and right eyes are aligned relative to the camera position by changing the Eye Position.

Setting a custom stereoscopic camera

You can use external cameras to define which is the left eye and which is the right eye. In Stereoscopy > Custom Cameras, click the Left Camera button to link to the left eye camera, and click the Right Camera button to link to the right eye.

When exporting stereo cameras from Maya, Guerilla automatically connects the left and right cameras.