Tag Archives: camera

Camera Mixer : Da news

  By MrPingouin | March 13, 2011 - 7:52 pm | Development, News 7 Comments

This is it !
The Camera Mixer for 3dsmax v0.1 is finally out !

Operational :

- Real time playing
- File Open/Save
- Export the mix to 3dsmax’s batch renderer
- Save a preview of the whole mix
- Usual UI controls : snap, delete/repace, mute/solo, move track up/down

0.2 planned features :
- Make the worksheet scalable
- Create an After FX composition
- Manage background image sequences

The tool is here : Camera Mixer
Camera Mixer on Scriptspot

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Camera Mixer

  By MrPingouin | January 7, 2011 - 3:19 am | Development 2 Comments

As an animator, I often have to deal with several cameras in a scene.

The last project I worked on contained 8 cameras (for 8 plans), it was a layout single maxfile that was given to me, I had to create the final animations.

But then I started thinking about the layout creation itself.

The workflow is this one :

  • Use camera name patterns :  CameraName startFrame – endFrame (“Plan01 0 – 150″, “Plan02 0 – 50″)
  • Create previews as jpg sequence, one for each camera
  • Import and Edit the sequences with Premiere/After FX/Whatever
  • Compile and Check the result

Issues :

  • Each time the animation is corrected (cameras or actors), the user has to regenerate the preview of modified sequences, reload them in After/Premiere, and compile the whole project to see the result.
  • Each time a camera frame range is modified, you have to correctly rename it to maintain the project homogenous

This is annoying. That’s why I started developing  Camera Mixer for 3dsmax.

It’s kind of a track mixing tool : it has an independant timeline (the equivalent of the film editing software one), in which you can set the sequence of the different cameras of the scene.

The features will be as follow  :

  • Editing of the camera sequences
  • Real time playing
  • File sequence preview for not realtime playable scenes
  • Load/Save of mix files
  • Export a composition for After FX

The tool is developed using python, wxWidgets, and maxscript. Stay tuned.

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Wide Ratio Camera Tool

  By MrPingouin | December 24, 2010 - 1:29 am | Development Leave a comment

This tool creates a camera rig that overrides the project’s image output ratio.

Example :

- The final output image is for tv (HDTV 1280×720) : ratio 1.77.
- We want to display some 2.35 ratio for some “movie effect”.

It works with 3dsmax’s default cameras (free and target), and VrayPhysicalCameras.
The ratio is handled by a Custom Attribute in the created “c” helper.
The masks are properly wired : the ratio and the camera’s focal length can be animated.

MXS : WideRatioCameraTool.ms

WideRatioCameraTool on Scriptspot

Additional info :

There is an issue with VrayPhysicalCam that can be easily bypassed.

Vray includes the target distance in its field/angle of view calculation :

- When target distance > 5 meters, everything is ok
- When target distance < 5m, you have to check “Specify focus”, and set a huge value on the “focus distance” (like a focus set to “infinity”). If you don’t do this, the camera rig will produce unexpected results.

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