Camera basics - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

- When you view a new Cinema 4D scene, typically you are looking through the default camera. This is a camera where you have no control over the settings or how it animates. And this move here will become familiar with some camera basics and create a camera rig that could be reused in other scenes. First we'll create the camera. We'll come over to here and just click on the icon. And the camera is added to the object manager but look in the coordinates tab, we'll see that some position coordinates are assigned in rotation as well. And if we look through the camera, the view doesn't change. Whenever you create a camera, it takes on the attributes of the current view that you're in. We can come over here and choose reset PSR. And that will zero out the coordinates. If we just back this up a little bit, we can start the position this camera and frame it up on our scene. One thing I like to do when I'm working with a camera is to come into the object tab and just check out the different lenses. So currently we've got this classic lens. Let's switch over to a normal lens so we get slightly flattened out look. We could go super wide. We'd have to just zoom in a bit just to see what's going on. We can see how the perspective is changing here. If we went to the other extreme, like a super telephoto and come out a bit, we'll see how this is flattening the perspective. So what I'd like to do is just switch this back to 50 mil and we're miles away because of the telephoto lens but we'll just come back in and start to frame up this composition. Now, the tab I'm interested in is the composition tab. And this enables me to turn on things like grids and a golden section and things like that. I can start to position the camera in a way that makes this composition more pleasing to the eye. So I could frame this up, like so. Just kind of get it how I get to be. Easing those composition helpers. And if they're hard to see here, they probably are because of the colors that we have. You can come in and change them. So just drop down and we can just use this color value. We can change this to a red grid. We can change the number of cells quite like working with the rule of thirds. So leave that on three, the golden section that we have here, you can turn things on and off change the color of course. Use the picker just to apply that same color. We come back into the object tab. The framing of the scene is linked to the field of view. So if we were to change our settings here in our render settings, it's going to change the film aspect. And so let's just change this to a square pixel. So we'll go 1080 by 1080. You'll see that the film aspect changes to square. And also the field of view has changed as well. That would mean we'd have to compose our scene once again to match the output. Now something that you can do to see what will be rendered and what won't be is to turn on the render safe areas. So we can press shift + V in this ring of the view settings. In the safe frame's tab, we can turn on things like title safe and action safe. We can also turn on tinted border for the render safe. And if we just really crank this up to 100%, cause see, anything in borders is not going to be rendered. So this is our view. Now those compositional helpers are a bit distracting. So if I just turn those off and press shift + V once again, we can turn off our safe frames or turn them on and off individually. This can be a good visual aid to help you compose the frame as well. And so now you can position the camera, knowing that everything inside the borders is going to be rendered. Everything outside would not be rendered. Let's have a look at another example. So in this scene we have multiple cameras and we can just click on here to change through them. Now if you don't like this smooth view transition, this is something that you can change in the preferences. Come over to edit preferences and in navigation, we can turn off smooth V transition. And then that will just mean that we switch to our cameras without the smooth view transition happening. So I like that better for me. That's better personally, but it's up to you if you want to keep that change or not. With multiple cameras, you can see there's an option here in the HUD. You can switch between the default camera or any other cameras that you have in your scene really quickly. So we can just use this option here. And that's a very fast way of navigating different cameras rather than coming over to the object manager all the time. So you can show that by pressing shift + V, coming over to the HUD and just checking on camera. If I toggle that you can see it come on and off in the view port there. Something you'll notice as one of the options here, I've got depth of field turned on and some of these cameras have some depth of field set up. And to do that, it's a combination of working in the physical tab, can work in the details tab, but mainly you want to set up a focal distance in the object tab. So I typically do this from the top view. If you're in our model mode, you get the handles on the cameras here. So this is the focal distance right here, this handle. So to change the focal distance of this wide camera, all we can do just bring it in. You can see that value changing. You can then set the F stop here, which will give you the depth of field and also turn on the diaphragm shape. And you can change the number of blades and things like that to give it a nice bokeh effect. You know, I have it to use really, really small values instead of the typical F numbers that you'd see here because of the scale of the scene. So just bear that in mind, when you're working in C 4D. The scale of objects is usually pretty large compared to the real world. So let's create a symbol camera rig and this will be something that we can reuse in other projects. First of all create a camera and I'm going to reset its position, scale and rotation by clicking here. So there's our camera. You can see his wire frame and I'm going to set the Z position to -1920. And it's going to jump back in the Z-axis here. So just zoom out here. The next thing I want to do is create a null object. Create that at zero and then make the camera a child of the null object. So by doing this, we can restrict certain movements to the camera object such as the position and then maybe the null object can handle things like rotation. By breaking it down in this way, it makes animating a camera a lot easier. So I'm going to rename this null Basic Camera Rig cause it's pretty simplistic. And then if we select these objects, we can choose file, save selected object as, and just give it a name. Basic Camera Rig and just choose save. So those are some Cinema 4D camera basics. Remember, you can use the HUD to keep track of which camera you're looking through. And next we'll look at how we can animate cameras using the simple rig we've just created.