How to Use the Camera in Blender (Tutorial)

in this tutorial i'm going to show you how to use the camera in blender so i'll show you how to add a camera and also show you how to navigate your camera around in your 3d scene and then i'll also go over some different camera settings like focal length and some composition guides and other camera settings and then i'll also go over a few more settings like how to use depth of field and some other things like that so for demonstration in the tutorial i created this little nature scene right here and these low poly nature assets are from a tutorial that i created on how to create low poly nature assets in blender i'll have a link in the description if you'd like to watch that tutorial and then i also use geometry nodes to distribute all the nature assets on this plane and i do also have a tutorial on how to set this up using geometry nodes again links in the description if you'd like to check that out so to add a camera in blender you just press shift a and you go right down here and the camera is right there you can also click right here on add and you can go down here and add a camera so just like any other object in blender you can press g to grab s to scale and r to rotate and so you can move the camera now if you want to go into the camera view you can press the zero key on the numpad and that is going to take you into the camera's view so 0 on the numpad that'll take you in and out of the camera's perspective now if you don't have a numpad on your keyboard then you can hit the grave accent button and then that's going to bring up the pi menu and you can go to the camera view so this button is a less common button i'll throw right up on the screen a picture of the button and also you can see my screencast keys are right down here if i click on it it says accent grade so if you hold that button down then it's going to bring up the pi menu and you can go to different things like the left view the right view and the top view but you can also just hold that down hold down that button and go to the camera view now when i'm going into the camera's view it's going into the camera which has the black triangle right here and so if you have multiple cameras in your blender scene one of the cameras is always going to be the active camera so if you want to change the active camera and change it to a different camera you can select the camera and then you can press ctrl numpad 0. control numpad 0 is going to bring you into the camera and it's also going to make it the active camera and you can also make a camera the active camera by selecting it and then by going here to the view and you can go down here and go to camera and then you can click on set active object as camera and that is going to do the same thing as the control numpad 0. now if you're inside the camera's view and you press the z key and then move up and let go to go into the rendered view you can see it's going to render everything as well as what's inside the camera's perspective but if you want to speed up the render time speed up the preview times you can press ctrl b in the camera and then you can click and drag and you can drag a box around the camera and that way now it's only going to render what the camera can see and so it doesn't have to render all of this extra space out here and so it's going to make the preview times faster because it doesn't have as much to render and when you're using the ev render engine this doesn't work it only works for the cycles engine and when you press ctrl b and drag over that is turning on this render region right here so if you go to the output properties you can check mark the render region and that is also going to turn it on and if you want to see like a specific part and have it render faster you can press ctrl b just drag a box around that and then you can zoom in there and you can just see that little part alright so now i'm going to show you how to move around the camera so if you just select the camera you can just click on it to select it or if you're in the camera's perspective you can just click right up here and that is going to select the camera so you can press g to grab and then you can just move around your mouse and that's going to move the camera around sideways and if you want to move the camera back and forth with the camera selected you can press the g key and then after you press the g key you can double tap the z key and that is going to bring the camera in and out if i just go right back over here let me zoom into the camera i can press g to grab just like any other object and then i press z once and that is going to bring it up and down on the global space so it's going to bring it up and down on the z-axis within the world but if you tap the z key a second time it's going to move it over on the local space so instead of it moving up and down on the z-axis it's going to move it back and forth because for the camera's local space the z-axis is going back and forth now what you can also do is you can double tap the r key and that is going to turn on the trackball rotation again just like any other object if i just select this camera or any other object i can double tap the r key and that's going to turn on the trackball rotation i can just click right up here to select the camera and then double tap the r key and then that's going to look around and then also i can hold down the shift key and that's going to make my movements more sensitive so i can get it more to a specific spot i can also press r to rotate and then i can hit x to rotate it on the x-axis but again that is rotating it on the global x so it's rotating it on the x axis of the world but if i hit the x key again now it's going to rotate on the object's local rotation so again if i just go out of here to show you i can press r to rotate i can hit the x key that's going to rotate it on the x x-axis within the world or the global axes but then i can hit the x again and then that is going to use the local axis instead of the global axis so it's going to rotate that up and down and i can do this for the y as well so i can press r to rotate and then tap the y key once or i can tap the y key again and now it's going to rotate side to side and also r to rotate and then double tap the z key and it's going to rotate that around and just like all the transforms in blender so the location rotation and scale as you're moving it for instance if i press g to grab you can hold down the shift key and that is going to make your movements more sensitive or i can press r to rotate and then hold down the shift key and i have to drag my mouse more in order to move it so that can help you if you want to get it to a more specific spot now there's also a couple more really cool ways to move the camera so if you press the shift and then hit the grave accent so shift grave accent then that is going to put you into the fly mode so now you can see that i can move the camera's view around by moving the mouse and then i can either use the arrow keys or i can also use the wasd so the wasd kind of like a video game and you can actually move around and then you can use your mouse to look around and so this is a super easy way to move around the camera now if you want to change the speed you can use your mouse wheel so i can scroll my mouse wheel and now you can see that it's going to move faster or i can scroll my mouse wheel down and it's going to move much more slow and then once this is at a spot that i like i can just left click to place that now instead of using the shift accent i've actually set up blender so that it uses shift f so i've set up my blender preferences so that shift f is going to enable the fly mode so if you'd like to do that as well you can just click on edit and then open up the preferences and then in blender's user preferences you can click over on the key map and you can start to type in fly and you can see there's the view navigation walk fly so here it is right here you can see it's the shift grave accent but i've actually set mine to shift f so i can just click on this restore button and you can see that's the default so if you want to change it you can just click right here and then you can press shift f and that is going to set the shortcut key now to shift f and then right next to me you can click on the save preferences button and that way it's going to save the preferences so all your future blender files use the same shortcut key so you can just click on save preferences and then close the user preferences so i can now press shift f and that is going to bring me into the fly mode and you don't have to be inside the camera even if you're outside of the camera's perspective you can press shift f and that is going to bring you into the fly navigation now another really great way to move around the camera is to lock the camera to your view so how you do this is you press n and that is going to open up the side panel and i'm going to click on the view button and then right here on view lock you can click on the lock camera to view and then i'm just going to press n to close that so if you're in the camera view you can now just navigate normally so you can click and hold with your middle mouse wheel to move around you can also hold down the shift key and middle click and then also hold down the control key and middle click and it's going to move around the camera just like you would navigate normally in blender and then if you press the numpad 0 that's going to take you out of the camera view and then you can just move around normally but then when you press zero again it's going to move around the camera now i don't actually use this very much because usually when i'm using this i forget that i have it turned on and then inside the camera view i just click with my middle mouse wheel to go out of the camera's view and then i accidentally move the camera and so i move it where i don't want it so i usually don't use this setting but you could totally use it if you want to i'm going to press n to open up this and then i'm going to click on camera to view to turn that off and then i can press n to close that panel because i like to click with my middle mouse wheel and that will just bring you out of the camera so if you're in the camera view you can click with your middle mouse wheel and just drag and that's just going to pull you out of the camera's perspective now let's say that i've moved to a specific location and then i want to bring the camera to this exact location well what you can do is you can press control alt and then numpad zero and that is going to bring the camera to right where you are and this is a super useful feature i use this all the time because if i'm moving around let's say i want the camera to be looking at this tree i can just move here i just press ctrl alt numpad 0 and that is going to bring the camera to that view and then i can press g to grab and kind of move it further to get it exactly where i want and again if you don't have a numpad what you can do is click on view right up here and then you can go down here to align view and then you can click on align active camera to view and that is going to align the camera to your view it's going to do the same thing as the control alt numpad 0. now if you want to change the resolution or the aspect ratio of the camera then you're going to go right over here to the output properties and then you can change the resolution right here so if you wanted it to be like a square image then you would just need to change the x and y to the exact same value so maybe 1920 by 1920 or you could like bring this in and then that would be more like a portrait or you could bring this way out to be more like a landscape you can also look up different video resolutions online if you want to change it to a specific resolution but a very standard resolution is 1920x1080 and then this percentage is just going to be 100 of the 1920x1080 now the camera itself also has a bunch of different settings in the object data properties so if you select the camera you can see that this is going to appear and this is the object data properties so you can click on this and then you have a bunch of different camera settings so i'm just going to show you the main ones that you're probably going to use so i'm first going to open up the viewport display and then i'm going to go right down here and open up the composition guide so these composition guides are really cool like maybe you're setting up a specific scene and maybe you want this mushroom right here to be in the rule of thirds you can use these composition guides so for instance i could click on the thirds right there and then it's going to add the grid there but that grid isn't going to show up in the render it's just a view for you to kind of see the rule of thirds or you could also click on the center there and that's going to have two dotted lines in the center just to show exactly where the center is so if you want this mushroom to be in the very center you could use those guides and they also have a bunch of different ones here you can see they have a bunch of them i don't really use these that much i really just use the center and the rule of thirds now blender also has this past par 2 setting if i'm pronouncing it correctly and so if you turn this on then it's going to make everything outside of the camera or everything around the camera a darker color and so you can change the transparency so i will often use this if i'm doing something like an animation and i don't want to see anything else that's distracting and i just want to see what the final render is going to look like i can turn this all the way up to one and then you're not going to be able to see anything outside of the camera or you could turn this all the way off if you want to be able to see what's in the camera's view but also see everything around here the default is 0.5 so usually i just leave it at 0.5 but sometimes i like to turn this up to 1. so let's close the viewport display and you can also open up the lens settings right here so you can actually change the camera's lens so the default one is perspective and that's what you're going to use for most things and then you also have a focal length so you can actually change the focal length of the camera so if you want to give it a very fisheye look kind of like what those gopros or action cameras look like usually they have a bit of a fisheye you could turn up the focal length and make it really small and then you're going to be able to see more things around the camera or you could also turn the focal length up and make it really big and then it's kind of going to make it look like you're zooming in and everything is going to look more flat and you can also change the lens type so instead of it being perspective you could also change to orthographic and that is going to make everything super flat and it's not going to use any of the perspective so if you're navigating around in blender and you press 1 on the numpad for front view or 3 for side view or 7 for top view that is putting you into the orthographic perspective you can see right there it says orthographic but then when you're just normally navigating around you are in the perspective view so if you want to render with orthographic you can change the lens type to orthographic and then you have the orthographic scale you can see here it says orthographic scale just to change the scale of how much the camera can see now you can also change your view to panoramic but this isn't really going to look any different in eevee and that's because this doesn't really do much in ev you're going to need to change it to cycles so i'm going to go right over here and change the rendering engine to cycles and then you can now see what's happening so let me go back over here to the object data properties so the panoramic is basically giving it like a fisheye effect so i can look around and that is looking really weird um and you have some different settings here like the lens so you can change the lens so you can zoom in and out and you can also change the field of view so that is going to change that circle there and within the lens type you also have a panorama type so you can change it to some different ones here there's also this one right here and this one is used if you want to create your own hdris because it's actually going to see everything that's around the camera i actually have a tutorial on how to create your own hdris and blender if you'd like to check that out i'll have the links in the description i'm just going to change this back to perspective though because that's what i'm going to use for most things now within the lens settings you also have a clip start and a clip end so this is going to tell the camera how far it's going to be able to see so if i take the end here and i start to make it smaller you can see that eventually that mountain there in the background is going to disappear and you can see right here after about 270 it starts to disappear because this mountain here this low poly mountain is really far away and so now you can't see it so if i now zoom into the camera i can change this end value and you can see it's going to be closer or farther away so if you have a really big scene and things are very far away you need to see really far away then you can turn up this end value to a giant number and the same thing works for the start clip so if i just zoom really close if i zoom in here you can see that we're kind of cutting through this tree but if i turn the clip start down and make it even smaller then you're able to see closer to the camera all right and then the last thing that i'm going to show you is how to add a depth of field so if you go right here again to the camera settings just make sure you select the camera and go to the object data properties you can turn on the depth of field right here now what you could do is you could just change the focus distance so i could make this really small and you can see that now it's going to just focus on that tree really close up or i could turn the focus distance up maybe to turn it up to like a 10 or something and now you can see that tree isn't focused but like the mountain is blurred and this tree is blurred so you could do that if you want to but i prefer to set the focus to an object and then i can move the object around and it's going to change the focus so i want to use an object that isn't visible to the camera so it doesn't actually render anything so i'm going to press shift a and i'm going to go right down here to empty and i'm going to add a plain axis so this object is not visible to the camera so it's not going to show up in the render but i can now set the focus to that object so now that i have the empty right here i'm going to click on the camera and i can go right down here to the depth of field and i can click on the eyedropper and then i can select the empty or you can also click right here and you can choose any object so now that i've set this empty as the focus object i can just make it farther away or closer up and the camera is always going to focus where this object is so you can see that if i bring this a little bit further now you can see that it's focusing on the mushroom or i can bring it even farther and now it's going to focus kind of on those trees or i can bring it really really far and then the mushroom is kind of going to get more blurred and it's going to focus more on the stuff in the background so this is super useful and you can even animate this object if you want to animate where the focus is and then if you want to change the strength of the blur right over here on the camera settings you can change the f-stop so if you make the f-stop a very very small value then things are going to be very very blurred and this almost looks like a super mini scene like you're zooming up really close and so everything is super blurred or if you want to make more things in focus and have it more subtle you could turn up the f-stop more so you can see now that it's at an f-stop value of 10 most things are in focus and you could also play around with these other settings right here so the blades and rotation and ratio but i pretty much just use the f-stop that's the main setting that you're gonna use and that's gonna be it for this tutorial so that is how you use the blender camera so i hope this tutorial was helpful and thank you for watching

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 361,813

Keywords: Ryan King Art, Blender Tutorial, Blender, Ryan King, Tutorial, camera, how to use the camera, focus, focal length, 3d, blender camera

Id: aY04h4ujrlY

Length: 16min 32sec (992 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 25 2022