From the course: 3ds Max 2019 Essential Training

Creating a physical camera and target - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2019 Essential Training

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Creating a physical camera and target

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- [Instructor] In this chapter, we'll look at the basics of camera techniques in 3ds Max. We can choose from two different cameras. The physical camera is the newer and, I think, better, and then there is the older version which is the standard camera. Each one of those can either have a look-at point, known as a target, or it can be rotated directly, in which case it's a free camera. Let's start with the physical camera. When you create a physical camera, it always has a target attached. So let's do that. I want to do it in the top view port because that's really the best way to create a camera, especially a targeted camera, because you're going to need to click and drag in the view port to create the camera and its target. It's just easiest to see what you're doing in a top view port. I'll go over to the top view, and let's see this in a shaded mode. I'll press F3 to see shading. Unfortunately, I can't see through the ceiling, but I can hide the ceiling geometry. I've got them on a display layer. Open up the layer explorer from the main toolbar. In the layer explorer, just disable visibility for the ceiling and the ceiling lighting. Now we can see the room very clearly. So let's create our camera. I'll turn the layer explorer back off again. Go to the Create panel, and we have categories here. Instead of Geometry, we want to go to Cameras. We have physical, target, and free. Physical is, as I said before, the more modern camera, and target and free are both flavors of the standard, old-school camera. Let's create a physical camera. Click on Physical, and then click and drag in the top view port. Release the mouse to determine the position of the target, and then right-click to exit creation mode. As we can see in the left and front views, it's positioned right at the ground plane, so let's move it up. We can select the camera or its target, or actually, we can select them both. The way to do that is to click on the line that joins the two. Get in closer with the wheel, deselect everything, and there is a blue line here. It's kind of hard to see right now, but it is there. I'll select both the camera and its target with the selection rectangle, and then select and move, bring that up. You can see the blue line there. If I just click on that line, I'm actually selecting both the camera and its target. Let's load the camera into a view port. I like to keep the perspective view available for the God's-eye point of view, or the artist point of view. I'll also need to have a panel for the camera point of view. I'm going to need the top view because that's my layout, or plan view. I can sacrifice this left view over here and load the camera into that view. From the view port label menu, I can click on the name of the view port, which is currently Left, and then choose Cameras, and then the name of the camera, which is PhysCamera001. Now we're looking through that camera's lens. Enable shading with F3, and we can experiment with moving the camera or its target. I can select in the top view and move that target, and this is causing me to pan around the room. I can move it up or down if I go over to the front view and move that target up or down. That allows me to tilt. I'll undo that. Maybe select them both by clicking on the line and then move them both up, and I'm able to pedestal the camera. And of course, I can move the camera around the target. I can select that camera, and with the move tool, just move it around. We can see that it's always going to look at that target. We'll probably want to change the field of view, and that can be done from the Modify panel. You can select the camera explicitly in any view, or you can use the view port label menu to select the camera. You can go to the name of the camera and choose Select Camera. And then go to the Modify panel, and we have physical controls here. We can set the size of the sensor and the focal length in millimeters. I'm more comfortable just setting the field of view manually, so I'll turn on the switch that says Specify FOV, or field of view. I can click and drag on that degree spinner to zoom out. I don't want to go farther than maybe 90 or 100 degrees, otherwise it's going to introduce a lot of distortion. I'll set that field of view to 80 degrees and press the Enter key. That's the basics of creating a physical camera.

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