The ULTIMATE GUIDE to Cameras in Blender (Beginners Start Here!)

oh what's up guys justin here with the cg essentials.com back with another blender camera tutorial for you so when i first started off with blender i found the camera system to be a little bit confusing so it's a little bit counterintuitive in the sense that the view you see in your 3d 3d viewport isn't always the view that you're actually going to see when you render other things like that so when i first started off just getting all of that to work and finding the fastest easiest way to do that was a bit of a struggle however with doing a little bit of research and working with it a little more i really feel comfortable with the cameras now and i thought that i could create a tutorial that would kind of walk you through exactly how to use cameras in different ways inside of blender so let's go ahead and just jump into it alright so what is a camera and why does it matter so what cameras basically do is cameras are the tools you use to set what's going to be rendered as a part of an image inside of blender so like for example when i fly around inside of my 3d viewport and i set up a view right so let's say we set up a viewer we were looking down or we were looking up from like a lower angle like this at a model like my default model well if i wanted to render this view and i was to go in and i was to do a render render image notice how it's actually being rendered out in my scene is totally different than what you're seeing in the viewport right and so the reason that this is is because we need to set up a camera that shows us the view of our object so we basically need to set up a camera and tell blender okay this is our active camera and this is what we want you to render so what we would want in this situation is instead of me moving around in my viewport and setting up a view what we would want to do instead is we would want to select a camera like this one and we want to we would want to use that camera in order to create our animation so there's a little trick in here which we'll talk more about in a little bit but if i do a ctrl alt zero and i kind of zoom out and then i was to do a render well now my rendered image is going to contain what's actually shown in my viewport right and obviously it's a real quick render from ev but you can see how you set the way that things are rendered inside a blender using your camera view and your camera location and so let's start by looking what the camera actually is so the camera you can see inside of our scene is basically an object inside of our 3d space and what the camera does is it has an origin point right here as well as a viewport on the front side that's going to show us what that camera is actually going to see right so if we were to zoom in like this and place our camera in our viewport you can see how this is showing us exactly what this camera would see from this point right and these actually act as objects in the 3d space so let's say that i was to go to the top view like this and use the move tool in order to move this around so if i tap g and move this you can see i can move this in the 3d space in addition i can also do things like rotating the camera in the 3d space you can also scale these as well so you can use this basically like an object inside a blender and so we'll use that in the future to do things like animating cameras along paths so that our cameras move other things like that but just know that this object is going to be representative of your camera and that you can actually edit it in blender it's also going to show up as a camera object inside of your scene collection so you can see how when i select this it's selecting the camera option over here okay so in addition notice that when you select a camera object right so i'll select this model for a second but then i'm going to go back and select my camera object you get an option over here on the right hand side of the page for your object data properties that looks like a little camera so this little camera is going to contain things um having to do with what your camera sees inside your 3d viewport we can come back and look at this a little bit later but i just wanted you to be aware that there is a set of settings contained inside of the camera settings in blender that's going to affect the way that your camera acts alright so now let's talk about how to add a camera inside a blender as well as how to start navigating around setting up your camera views so the way that you add a camera is you basically add it like any object that you would add in the 3d workspace so what you would do is you would just do a shift a and you would add a camera so you just want to click on the button for camera right here notice how that got added where our 3d cursor is inside of blender so if you want to be a little bit more precise when you do this what you can do is before you place your camera you can do a shift right click to place your 3d cursor somewhere then you can do a shift a camera and notice how that camera gets placed where my 3d cursor is and so what we want to do is we want to start actually editing what your camera looks like right so what it sees where it is in the 3d space all of that and so there's a few ways you can do this so the first thing you could do you absolutely could do this is you could just move this camera around manually right so you can just select it tap the g key and then move it around and you could try to set things like the camera rotation all of that so a lot of that can be found inside of the item information over here so you can see how we can adjust things like the rotation on the x y and z axes things like that but the problem with that is it's really clunky right and so let's find a better way to look through our cameras so the first thing is whenever you have a camera inside of your model if you want to look through it you can use the numpad 0 key in order to jump into that view right so if i hit the zero key right now what that's going to do is that's going to jump into the view and it's going to show me what's shown or what the camera is going to see in my viewport so you can see how right here this is showing me what my camera sees but we want to adjust this right so that it's showing our car model kind of in the center and so the way that everyone really does this is basically what they do is they select their camera and then if they tap the n key and go into the view settings on the right hand side of the page there's actually an option here for lock 3d camera to view so right now for example inside this camera view if i zoom in and out you can see how the camera isn't moving with me right i could hit the zero key again to jump out of the view but it's not really doing what we want it to do however if you click on this button for lock camera to view and then navigate around inside your scene notice how your camera is now moving along with your your view location so now what we can do is we can just use the view inside of the scene in order to set up the way that our camera is going to look or what our camera is going to see then you can also come in here and you can make some fine adjustments like for example for this camera i don't want this to have a y rotation so i'm going to set this to zero so you can still adjust the transformation over here as well but basically this is going to be the fastest way to set up your camera view is to hit the zero key and then lock your camera to view one other trick when you do this and i'm going to uncheck the lock camera to view for a second is when you hit the zero key notice how this isn't taking up your full window inside your viewport right but if you hit the zero key and then you tap the home key before you lock this to view what that's going to do is that's going to zoom this camera to the extents of your view right here so now your full viewport is going to show you what's going to show up in your camera then we can just go over here and just turn on lock camera to view and we can make adjustments just like this then once you're done with that you can just hit the zero key to get back out of your camera alright so let's say you have a camera view that you really like or if you have a view inside of you your viewport that you really like like let's say so let's say you had a viewport inside of your screen like this and you wanted your camera to show this right so but you don't want to go back and you re-navigate with the camera active like let's say you navigated in here and you don't want to go back and do it again with your camera well what you can do is with your active camera you can do a control alt and then numpad zero so if i do a control alt numpad 0 notice what that's going to do is that's going to snap your camera to the location that you have selected inside of your 3d viewport so now if we were to rotate out of this outside of our camera view you can see how the camera has been placed inside of our car model right here and so now let's talk a little bit more about the properties of our camera from a focal length standpoint if you look up focal length focal length is basically going to set your angle of view meaning how much stuff is going to fit inside of your camera angle right so if you scroll down there's a couple examples of this so different camera lenses are going to have wider and narrower focal lengths and this is something that you should probably research a little bit when you're setting up your renderings but basically what it does is it allows you to use the focal length to set the width of your view inside of your camera scene so you can see how with these examples the higher the millimeters the smaller your focal length right so in this case because we have an interior view we want to use a lower focal length because that's going to basically allow more stuff into our view right so what we can do is we can adjust the camera focal length and our settings right here we'll notice how the camera focal length in our settings is basically giving us a narrower or wider field of view so if i adjust this to something like let's go with 20. notice how we're getting a much better view of our car inside of this scene so you can see how we can use that focal length width in order to adjust what we can see in here now one thing to be aware of when you do this is if you have a very narrow focal length or if you have a very small value in here what this is going to do is it's going to distort your image right so the the more that you move this to the left the more distortion you're going to get so just be aware when you're doing this that you want to kind of walk that line between getting more stuff in your you can kind of walk that line between getting more stuff in your camera view and making sure that you making sure that you don't have that distortion inside of your scene let's talk about how to manage multiple different cameras so you can see how in here i have multiple different camera views inside blender right and i'm going to go ahead and label this one so we're just going to call this inside car and what that means is that means that if i want to jump to my camera view inside of the car i'm going i hit the zero key it's going to bring me in the car however let's say that we have something where we have multiple different camera views so this is another model i've downloaded from sketchfab which is kind of like an old style like fort building it was actually kind of fun to build because it's got these modular parts and pieces in here so a lot of the time you're going to have multiple different camera views in a model because you want to show different things well in this situation for example i've got an overall camera view and i've got a close-up of a building right here and so let's say that we wanted to go to the close-up of a building camera view well if i hit the zero key right now notice how it's dropping me in a different camera view it's dropping me in the overall not in the one that shows the home that's because that camera is set to be the active camera and so whenever we hit the zero key what that's going to do is that's going to put our viewport inside of the active camera you can tell which camera is the active camera by looking over here in your outliner and noticing which one of these has the little gray box around it like this so right now for example you can see that our overall camera is the one that has the gray box so if we hit zero that's the one that it's going to put our view in however if we want to change which camera is our active camera what you can do is you can just come up here and you can just click on the green icon right here for this camera view well now if i hit the zero key notice how that's going to drop me in my closer camera view right here so you can use this to set which camera is active that's going to be the camera that shows up inside your view and it's going to be the camera that gets rendered so if we wanted to jump back to our car model we could select the one over here for inside of our car and then if we hit the zero key it's going to put us in that camera so you can toggle between the different cameras just by clicking on this little icon right here so you can also do that by selecting a camera in your viewport doing a control numpad zero that'll jump into a camera view and it'll also set that camera view as active alright so one thing you might have noticed when you have really large or really small models is that sometimes things inside of your viewport can get clipped out right so if you've ever had a model like this one where notice how when i zoom out you're starting to not see different parts of your model right so the reason for this is because blender has the cameras set up where they clip out at a certain length and so this is something that you can adjust inside of your view for your viewport or inside of your camera settings for your cameras but basically what they do is at a certain length in your larger models what this is going to do is it's going to hide everything beyond a given length in order to improve performance so i think there's some other technical aspects of the 3d view there as well but for the most part it's to improve performance we'll notice how inside of our view settings so if you tap the n key to pop this menu up and you click the little drop down right here there's a setting in here for clipping start and clipping in and so right now i have this set to a fairly low setting of a hundred meters well if we were to drag this to the right notice how in our scene more things start showing up and the reason why is because we're setting the furthest point at which this is clipping things out and we can adjust that value up so we can make sure that our spaceship model isn't getting clipped so in this case it'd probably be easiest to just put a value in here of like a thousand or something like that and so notice how when i put a value in here of a thousand my grid extends a lot further out as well and so notice how in my viewport this is showing up fine but if i was to tap the zero key and go to my camera view notice that this is still being clipped out the reason why is because your viewport does have a clipping start and end setting over here but your camera has a separate start and end setting so what you would need to do in this situation to keep this from getting clipped out is you would change this to something like a thousand so notice how when you change your camera clipping and you're inside of the camera then your clipping is fixed so that you can see everything inside your model cameras inside of blender can also handle depth of field so depth of field basically has to do with the amount of focus in an image so you've probably seen this method where a camera focuses on something close inside of a scene but then it gets blurry the further away the camera gets or the other way you could have it focus on something further away and have it get blurry close this is something having to do with the way your camera is set up and you can use it to create focus on objects in a scene well in this situation let's say that i have a camera view set up so i'm inside this camera right now and let's say i have three models i have two of these bonnie models and then the monkey head model right here well if you select this camera and go over into depth of field what you can do and you can already see it in here is you can set an object to focus on as well as the focus distance so let's say for example that i wanted to focus on this front model well what i could do is i could use the eyedropper here to focus on this model notice how we can adjust this specifically having to do specifically with our f-stop value we can adjust how strong this effect is right so the lower value is going to make everything even the object that we're focusing on blurry a higher value is going to make things a little bit more clear so we can use this in order to set our camera focus on an object so you could also if you didn't want to focus on an object you can manually set your focus distance in here as well so let's say i bring this down to like 1.1 then i bring my focus distance down well notice how my focus distance is being set inside of my camera based on the distance from the camera so you can use this to more manually control the way things are focused on and again remember you could swap this out for different effects so for example i could focus on the suzanne in here so i could have it be clear in the background and then you could have these other models that are more blurry in the foreground so if you guys are interested i can continue this series talking maybe in the next one about doing a little more with the animation of different cameras and setting up different kinds of shots but leave a comment below let me know what you're interested in there as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this i really appreciate it and i will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The CG Essentials

Views: 2,209

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Keywords: blender, blender 2.82, blender 2.8, blender modifier tutorials, blender tool tutorial, the blender essentials, the cg essentials, thecgessentials.com, justin geis, justin geis blender, blender 2.9, blender 2.91, blender cameras, blender camera tutorial, blender camera lesson, blender lessons, blender camera for beginners, blender how to use cameras, blender render camera view

Id: TvXoSiV6YrM

Length: 17min 55sec (1075 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 02 2021