Offsetting the image with Lens Shift - 3ds max Camera Techniques

Offsetting the image with Lens Shift - 3ds max Camera Techniques  The best way to approach this, I think, is to have no tilt to the camera. So we can set the rotation value for the Y axis here to 90 degrees, so it has no tilt and then with that camera selected, go into the Modify panel, scroll down to the bottom, and you'll see Perspective Control. And we have Lens Shift horizontal and vertical. If I want to see more of the ceiling then I can just change this vertical percentage value. I just drag that down, give it a negative value, and I'm shifting the view upward in two dimensions. So now we're seeing the top of the ceiling here, but we're still in a two point perspective.

 The vertical lines are still parallel. Alright, I can set that back to zero. So that's for moving the horizon line up or down. We can also shift left and right with a horizontal offset and that's not really that applicable in this situation, but it does come in handy in certain cases, like for example if you're orbiting the camera around its target, you can use this horizontal offset to move the target in screen space and shift it left and right. 'Kay, I'll set that horizontal back to zero. There's also Tilt Correction. I don't tend to use that myself, but it's there if you want it.

Setting rotation axis order - 3ds max Camera Techniques

Setting rotation axis order - 3ds max Camera Techniques Then the y axis, which is the green one has a child which is the x axis. So it follows when I rotate in y the x axis follows. But the z axis does not follow because it's the parent. So it's not going to inherit from it's child. Alright, then we rotate around x, nothing follows x because x is the ultimate child in this hierarchy. Okay, so I'm going to restore everything back to zero. Just type in zero's for x, y, and z. And now my camera is facing straight down and I'm going to change the axis order or the order of priority. What I want to have happen is that the line of sight axis or the z axis should be the least important one and the one that does not transmit any information to the other axis, in other words I want it to be the child to the priority I want is I want the pan axis to be the most important. The tilt axis, less important, and the dutch tilt axis least important. To change the axis orders select the object and go up to the motion panel. We haven't seen this one yet in this course. It looks like a little moving sphere or wheel. Click on motion and then down here we have p, r, s parameters, position rotation scale. Click on the button labeled rotation to get at the rotation parameters.

3ds max Lighting Using the Light Explorer

3ds max Lighting Using the Light Explorer And click okay. And now all the lights are actually working in this view port. Okay, let's take a look at the light explorer. It's found under Tools, All Global Explorers, Light Explorer and I'm going to make this wider, just change the side of this because it's too narrow to see all of the fun things that are found in here. Especially this light intensity. I want to adjust that a lot. So I'm going to move that column over to the left, just click and drag and move it over there. 

3ds max Lighting Using the Light Explorer And then I can resize the window so it's not taking up too much space on the screen. And these are the most important properties, the name of the light, its object color, visibility, and its light status, whether it's on or off and then its intensity. Now these are all instances, so if I turn one of them off flicking this light on switch, then they all turn off. Turn that back on again. Likewise with the intensity, if I change one, they will all change. And this is said to have physically accurate value of 240 candelas. The light intensity here is listed in candelas.

3ds max Lighting Illuminating a scene with the environment

3ds max Lighting Illuminating a scene with the environment . And that's up here at the top. And we have Common Parameters, Background, Color, or Environment Map. And the Environment Map is where we would put a bitmap image, or maybe a physical sun and sky environment. We can also just give it a background color. And in Arnold, that will actually emit light into the scene. Click on the color swatch, and increase the value, and immediately we see we're getting a very intense light coming through the windows. And it looks blueish, because, again, this is defaulted to a 65k, or 6500 Kelvin degrees Color Temperature. But we are shooting it through a camera sensor that's set to a warmer color of 5000 degrees Kelvin making this white light coming through the windows appear more blueish. And we want to have a little bit less illumination coming through just enough to make it look like it's overexposed. So in this case, maybe a value of 12 or so

3ds max Lighting Illuminating a scene with the environment  If we want it to look like there's more light coming, of course we could crank it up, let's give it a value of 15. And click Ok. And that's very simple, we've just added environmental lighting. And what that did, is behind the scenes, it converted that into an Arnold sky dome light. But again, if you want to learn more about that, check out my other course, 3ds Max: Rendering with Arnold. That's how to setup a basic environment color, in order to provide background illumination.

3ds max Lighting Creating a sun and sky

3ds max Lighting Creating a sun and sky  Click and drag on the Azimuth and observe the results in all the views as well as the ActiveShade window, and I can give that an Azimuth value of not nearly 300. I'll bring that around to maybe 320 or so, and I've got a little spill of light there. Then we can bring the Altitude down. Click and drag that value, and we're lowering the sun in the sky 'til it gets very close to the horizon, and if we're lucky we can actually see it through the window here. There it is. So I'll give the Azimuth a little bit higher value. Let's make that 330, and now I can see the sun there. So we can change the exposure value in the Global Exposure value here if you bring that up to a value of 16, and we can see the sun a little bit better there. Notice by the way that I have Use Physical Camera Controls if Available turned off so that all cameras in this scene will obey these exposure values. Alright, so that's how to do a manual sun position. 

Let's also do it by date, time, and location. Select Date, Time, and Location in the Date and Time Mode, and then choose a location on Earth, and it's currently San Francisco, California. Click on that button, and I'm going to choose Portland, Oregon. Just click on the map somewhere, and I've got North America, but of course I can choose different areas. We've got Portland, Oregon here. It pops right up, so I'll click OK. I'll set the Date and Time. The Day is going to be the first of the month. The Month is May or the fifth month of the Year 2018, and the Date and Time, I'll increase the hour, so as I increase this up past 15, we start to see a splash of light in the office there. At 1800 hours we're getting good side illumination. Then we can change up our Exposure Value. Let's set that to 13. Now that's exposed pretty well. We can scroll down a little bit into the parameters for the Physical Camera Exposure Control and just change up this contrast curve

3ds max Lighting Controlling spotlight parameters

3ds max Lighting Controlling spotlight parameters And we can demonstrate that if we rotate the light. Grab the rotate tool and tilt it down, and then reframe our shot so that we can see some shadows. And enclose on those shadows, and take a look in the active shade window. So that is with a disc radius of something like 40 centimeters. Let's set that radius down to one centimeter and now we've got hard shadows. Alright. Put that up to , let's say, 20 centimeters. Now, we can talk about the hotspot and falloff values. I'll dolly back, reframe the shot, and with that light selected go back into it's modified panel. And we have some special parameters for the spotlight distribution. Scrolling back up to near the top of the modified panel. We've got distribution spotlight rollout. And here we have hotspot and falloff. And these are angular values that determine the softness of the light

3ds max Hierarchies Avoiding and correcting scale issues

Non-uniform scale causes rotation and deformation issues

3ds max Hierarchies Avoiding and correcting scale issues I'll scale up in the Z axis while watching the results here in the Transform Type In area so that I get a Z scaling of exactly 200%. Click and drag that up and when I get to 200 I'll stop and now that's been scaled up. We can investigate by going into the Transform Type In dialogue, right click on the Scale tool, and it says that I've got a value of 200.151. So I'll just round that off. Type that in and now we have a situation in which we have an object with non-uniform scaling. Now again, this is not a good situation. We're going to try to avoid this, but I first need to illustrate why we need to avoid it. So I'll close Transform Type In dialogue and create some links. Let's just link the head. Grab the Select and Link tool and link it to the chest. Then let's try rotating it. Grab the Rotate tool and rotate that head and instantly we see that there is a problem. The head is changing shape as it rotates. 

In 3DS Max, is the scaling models bad and why? I'll undo that. I've actually got angle snaps turned on, so I'll turn that off and we can see the skewing happen interactively now. That's happening because of the order of operations for transforms of position, rotation, and scale. Similarly to how we saw that the order of rotation axes has an influence on the result, here we're seeing an artifact resulting from the internal order of operations of transforms in which objects are positioned then rotated and then scaled all relative to their parent. So that's the key to what's happening here. The parent object, which is the torso or chest, is scaled up by a factor of two. It's got a Z scale of 200 and what's happening is that is being inherited by the head object and it's happening after the rotations because the order of operations for transforms is, again, position, rotation, and scale. Okay, so that's why this is all happening. And this is happening because the scale is being performed after the rotation. Remember that the transform order is position, rotation, and scale. Alright, well we don't want to see this so let's undo. I'll right click on the Undo button, go into the History, and go back before we did the link. So select Link and choose Undo