Cinema 4D: Camera Basics Explained

[Applause] let's take a look at some camera basics inside of cinema 4d now most of us use our perspective view more or less as our camera view a lot of times we spin the view around and we kind of compose our shot inside the perspective window so I've got these three coffee cups I just want to compose a shot where I can see all three of them I want something in the foreground something in the background so I want something that looks you know maybe kind of like you know something more or less like that that's kind of how I want my final shot to be but right now I'm still looking at it from the perspective window and you know that's okay but if you really want to have the ultimate control over the final outcome of your image you really should go ahead and put a camera in the scene when you add in a virtual camera you'll get more control over how you compose the final shot you can utilize things like focal length shutter speeds and probably most importantly at the moment depth of field now when I add a new camera I want to make sure my perspective view is active because I've already sort of roughly composed my shot in the perspective view when I make a new camera it will mimic what I've already got going on in terms of the angle in my perspective view which basically means I don't have to recompose the shot from scratch so I'm going to go into the camera icon hit camera you'll see in this case it's kind of large but that's okay actually it's not large my coffee cups are kind of small you'll see in your scene you'll get a virtual camera there it is and zoom out a little more here okay there we go and you can see it pointing at kind of a funky angle at the cups if you look at my front view here you can see it kind of angled looking at the cups and in this angle that it's pointing at mimics the angle of my perspective view so when I made the camera like I said earlier mimicked the perspective view now if I go into our perspective window I'm actually not looking through the camera's lens just yet I'm still looking through the perspective view to actually look through the camera's lens you have to go to your camera object over in the objects manager and you click this little box right here and that will put you into the camera view now if you want to recompose your shot you can go into the scene and you can drag the camera around just like you would any other object so you'll notice if I go into the front view and drag the camera up and down you can see it booming in the perspective view booming is when you move your camera up and down it booms up and down okay if I dolly the camera in and out I can grab it and I can push the camera in and out and again as I'm dragging it in the front view you can see the composition change in my perspective window which is now my camera window my active camera window if I want a little more control over how to set up my shot you know I can move the camera like this which is what I was doing previously or if I use the view management tools this will actually now move the camera as well so when i zoom out of the shot and let go of my mouse button the camera will back out of the shot when i zoom in mouse button comes back in if I move the camera well let's let's move it up the camera will move up here so you can either compose the shot by manipulating the camera out here on the scene or you can do it I find it easier to do with the view management tools it's just I think a little easier to do it from the cameras point of view so let me compose my shot once again very so much like I had before what's interesting about these you know these virtual cameras that you typically get in your 3d software packages most of them will mimic real-world cameras as closely as possible for example you'll have focal lengths you'll have apertures and f-stop settings you'll have shutter speeds you some of them will have ISO for actually increasing the noise they'll have a focal distance for you know having a focal plane so you can then control your depth of field so if we take a look down here one of the first options that's kind of interesting is the focal length well that's the fancy word for zoom and again many of you if you if you had photography in the past you might have an idea of how wide in 18 millimeter lenses versus you know a 200 millimeter lens if you have a wider focal length a wider lens you'll get more barrel distortion and warping of the image so if I were to click on the preset here and go to like a 15 millimeter super wide and you'll see all of a sudden my coffee cups get small on the frame because the lens just got wider if I move the camera in to compose the shot look at all the barrel distortion I get on the cup it's totally warped and that's what would happen if you had a you know basically a cylindrical shape object on a really wide angle lens look at the cup in the background look how far away it appears to be again that's what happens optically with a real camera with a wide angle lens now if I go ahead and do the reverse of that and let's try like 130 135 millimeter telephoto lens all of a sudden my camera zooms in so I'm really close on the cups so let me just zoom the camera out a little bit kind of compose a similar shot here you'll notice the cup in the background looks a lot closer than it did earlier because it's mimicking the physics of a real camera lens so you'll get focal length compression optical illusions going on just like you would a real lens and you'll get less barrel distortion on the coffee cups again like you would if you were using a telephoto lens so the standard lens size is a normal lens is considered 50 to 55 millimeters so I'm going to go ahead and set this to 50 millimeters and let me just recompose my shot and that will give me a minimal amount of barrel distortion our eyes typically see somewhere around 50 millimeters that's how we're used to seeing the world and that's why this is referred to as a normal lens because it most closely matches what our I see day-to-day but these can be kind of fun to play around with you can use them to really particularly the wide-angle you'll get the same results you do with the real lens so you can really skew the objects and your rendering it's it's kind of interesting next up we have focal distance well that let you define a focal point what's actually going to be in sharp focus in the render if i zoom out a little bit on this case have to zoom out a lot you'll see my camera icon is much larger than my cups let me zoom in here a little bit there are my three cups and if i zoom out you see they the icon here what that represents the focal length goes all the way out here if I click this little dot in the middle I can adjust my focal length or I can go down here where it says focal distance I'm sorry I didn't misspoken I mean this a focal length focal distance this is what controls the focal plane what's going to be in sharp focus and you're rendering so the focal distance I can click on these little arrows and adjust it that way just like you can with any other numeric dialogue in cinema 4d or if you can get that little dot in the middle of the focal distance box here you can drag that in as well and I'm gonna go ahead and more or less put the focal distance on that middle cup of coffee just make sure yeah I kind of like more toward the front I suppose than the back but something like that and this would be like if you were to hit the shutter halfway on your camera to focus on an object you're defining your focal length so I'm going to put it right about there so at some point if I turn on depth of field this cup should be in focus and if I set up my depth of field properly these other cups the one in the background and the one in the foreground should become softer so before I get to the next tab you have focal length which controls the wide angle lens versus a telephoto lens and you've got your focal distance next up under the physical tab you've got your ability to adjust your f-stop and your shutter speed well I'm not doing any animation so the shutter speed really doesn't have an outcome it doesn't have an effect on the outcome of my render the shutter speed would come into play if the objects were in motion again very much like a real camera the slower the shutter speed the more blur you would get as the objects were animating past the camera the faster the shutter speed the sharper those objects would render out with less blur now I can adjust my f-stop at the moment it's all ghosted out because I have to turn on one other thing in cinema 4d before I can start my rendering if I go uptown to my render options the render at the moment is the standardized renderer and in order to take advantage of all the other settings available with these cameras all the other sort of realistic settings like the f-stop and shutter speed we have to switch over from the standard renderer to the physical renderer and that will add another option down here for my render output if I click on physical I can turn on depth of field and when I do that it'll make the f-stop over here come to life so you got to make sure you have that depth of field turned on a lot of folks forget that but it's one additional little thing you got to do here you got to go to renderer put the physical turn-on you depth of field all right great then you have your apertures your standard apertures to pick from now the thing to keep in mind is for the most part we don't really build things to scale unless you go ahead and measure everything out but if you don't go ahead and build things to scale the camera is programmed to work like in a real-world environment so when we don't make things to scale the apertures get a little messy so just for giggles I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna do like an f11 + f11 s a mid-range aperture usually gives a pretty deep reasonably deep depth of field so let me go ahead and render out these cups let's see what we get and your results will totally vary you're gonna have to play at this f-stop setting essentially the rules are the same the smaller you know I should say the higher the f-stop number the smaller the aperture the greater the depth of field the lower the f-stop value the wider the aperture the shallower the depth of field and again it doesn't behave it does behave like it does in the real world however we don't usually build things to scale and scale is critical when it comes to figuring out your depth of field so times sometimes you have to fudge the numbers quite a bit so here I am at f11 and my rendering is slowly progressing I can start to see that this coffee cup here appears to be in focus okay the one in the background is looking a little grainy and soft the one in the foreground is looking a little soft the blur is a little noisy because I have to turn up the anti-aliasing but I'll do that later once I've established my my aperture setting so we're going to let this rent out hey there's my final render and there's a little bit of blur going on here that's not too bad now if I wanted it to render out Shopper I would bring my f-stop up higher let's try let's try like an f-18 and see what that gives me and we're not gonna actually sit here and watch this render let's speed this up and look at the final outcome okay here we are looking at the F 11 this next one right here is the F 18 it's getting a little bit sharper let's go ahead and let's try to make the depth of field even shallower let's go to something ooh I've got mail no nothing important I should probably mute that I always forget they shot this stuff ha okay so let's try to make the depth of field even shallower let me go to a lower or a wider aperture but a lower f-stop value let's do something like a 2.8 let's give that a render yeah here's a final render at a 2.8 you see that this coffee cup is very much in focus but these guys are really blurry and out of focus and again they're really noisy I want to turn up the anti-aliasing next but before I do that I just want to point out one thing with the depth of field don't be afraid more often than not the scale of these coffee cups is is extra small but more often than not I go really open on the apertures I'll go to like an f1 and sometimes if that doesn't do it I'll get into surreal numbers like 0.5 or point zero eight well I totally just lost the window let's try late again point the zero eight if these numbers aren't working if you go all the way to 1.0 and your image is still coming out totally sharp try bringing this number down even farther it's a totally surrealistic number no camera in the world can do that but mathematically if the scale of your objects happens to be really large and you don't realize it you're gonna have to bring this number down normally I'm surprised the depth of field get a shallow as it did because like I said normally I'm at maybe like at 0.5 or 0.8 oops why is this not typing here we go point 5 or sometimes 0.8 but anyways you sometimes have to go below the 1 and get into a fraction there now what I'm gonna do this step the fields a little steep for me let me do let's do a 5.6 and let's bring up the anti-aliasing so I'm gonna go into my render settings now sometimes you adjust the anti-aliasing by going up to where it says anti-aliasing and normally go from geometry to best but right now it's ghosted out because the settings from the physical camera override this anti-aliasing they actually give you more finite adjustments to the anti-aliasing so if I click on physical really the only thing you got to mess around with is the sample quality right now it's on low I'm gonna go ahead I think I'm gonna put it right too high let's close that out and this is gonna take significantly longer to render but it should look a lot better and we'll be back in a few moments okay folks it finally finished that took a little bit of time but as you can see it looks a lot nicer than the previous render here's the original one with the low quality here it is on high and you can see it really softened up quite a bit however it did sacrifice some render time this one took the original one took about two minutes the high setting took about 33 minutes now I should preface this by saying you know I'm on a slightly older machine it's about four or five years old so the processors are a little sluggish too something that if you purchased recently so your results will definitely vary you'll most likely clock out quicker than I did here this did take a little bit longer but when you do jack up the quality it does sacrifice the render time it will take longer

Channel: John Szymkowicz

Views: 7,502

Rating: 4.9679999 out of 5

Keywords: c4d, cinema 4d, camera, dof, depth of field, focal length, physical renderer

Id: qRjmqQaz3mE

Length: 15min 16sec (916 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 08 2019