From the course: SketchUp: Rendering with V-Ray Next

Overview of the physical camera options

From the course: SketchUp: Rendering with V-Ray Next

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Overview of the physical camera options

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- [Instructor] Given that CG artists are oftentimes employed as virtual photographers, it is fitting that for the longest time now, V-Ray for SketchUp has offered users an extremely photographic approach to taking rendered pictures. The cool thing here being the fact that because the physical camera model it uses adheres very closely to the workings of a real-world camera, any familiarity that we have with using the controls of a film or digital camera in the real-world can be of great help to us when it comes to working with the V-Ray physical camera. What we want to do in this video then is take a quick look at some of the options that the V-Ray camera makes available to us. To access those, we will of course need to open up the asset editor and jump into the camera rollout found in the settings tab where we see a number of options that ultimately combine to give us a ton of control over the rendering camera in V-Ray. With the first set of options giving us the ability to actually set the type of camera that we want to render with. So, standard, VR spherical panorama, or... VR Q-map as well as the option to render in stereo or not. Now, generally speaking, most of us are going to be rendering with the default standard mono-camera, in V-Ray, but of course, if we do get to work on more specialized projects, then the VR and stereo options, that we see here, are obviously ready and waiting to be used. In the standard camera section, we can control our scene's exposure levels, by means of a simplified exposure value, which we will give a quick primer on, in the next exercise. Or we can decided to turn on the auto-exposure option and let V-Ray make the exposure choices for us. We can even use a more advanced set of camera controls, as found over in the advanced camera parameters rollout, where we find some very typical camera options, such as: ISO; F-number; and shutter speed. Of course, as well as controlling scene exposure, we also need to keep in mind that two of these advanced options, namely, shutter speed and F-stop, also control other elements inside a final rendered frame. So the F-stop, or F-number value, will affect or control any depth of field effects, in a render, if that option is turned on. Whilst the shutter speed option can be used to alter the look of motion blur, that we may be applying to, say, a camera animation. Coming to the camera effects sub menu, something that we can burn into any final renders that we take, would be a vignetting effect. This being the darkening that we oftentimes see around the edges of a photograph, that is typically the result of the way in which a camera's lens has been manufactured, but of course is something that in post-production, many artists like to add to their images. Now, personally, I would recommend adding these types of effects in an application such as Photoshop, seeing as we have much more control and flexibility over the final vignetting effect there, but this of course can be done here, if it's something that we want or need. Another common camera control found, even on cell or mobile phone cameras, these days, is the white balance option. This giving us the ability to set which of the colors found inside our rendered image, are to be considered as marking the white point. Do note here, that only the colors hue, is taken into consideration by this control, with the brightness, or value of a color, being completely ignored. Now, there are of course camera controls that we are skipping over here, such as: vertical tilt and bokeh, to name a few. But, that is because we are going to be coming back to many of these in subsequent videos. The V-Ray camera, then, definitely offers a genuinely photographic approach to rendering in V-Ray. Offering lots of control over the entire process. Indeed having the ability to take real-world photography experience and apply that to our work in a rendering package, has some very clear and obvious benefits. Given that anything we learn in real life, even whilst using a modest point and shoot, or as we say, cellphone camera, can be taken and then applied to our work inside V-Ray for SketchUp. With, of course, the opposite also being true, in that anything we learn inside V-Ray, being able to be taken out into the real-world and applied to our efforts at real-world photography.

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