From the course: Maya and Arnold: Exterior Lighting and Rendering

Preliminary camera placement - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya and Arnold: Exterior Lighting and Rendering

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Preliminary camera placement

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- When we light a scene, we're lighting to a specific view through a camera. Now this is a still image of the scene. And so we're going to take our camera perspective and use that to create our lighting model. So the first thing we want to do is actually create a camera. So I'm actually going to hop out into a four view here, and let's go ahead and create a Camera, and I want to create a Camera and Aim. And that will give me a little bit more control over how I point the camera. So that brings in two objects here. If I zoom in, say in the top window, you'll see that I've got this object here. And if we go into our Outliner, you'll see we have a camera group. So we have a camera and a camera aim. So we have two different objects here. So Camera Aim will basically, be where that camera is pointed. And so I'm going to place this towards the center of the scene maybe on this patio. And then under Panels here, I'm actually going to change my Perspective view to camera1. And this shows me exactly where that camera is. So I'm going to go ahead and select the camera in the Outliner. Let's go ahead and position that. So I'm going to move this in the top view. And as you can see, we can start to position this camera. Now we can also just position this camera by using our viewport control. So essentially I'm holding down the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac, and using my middle left and right mouse buttons to navigate the scene. In fact, I'm going to hit the space bar and make this a little bit bigger, and let's go ahead and just position this camera. Now, if I want to, I can also go under View and do Select Camera, and go over to my Attribute Editor, and you can see we have all of our camera controls. Now, one of the most important things is the angle of view or the focal length. Now, if I want to, I can make that focal length shorter. So say if it's 24, this scene will be wider, and the perspective will be a little bit more enhanced, or I can bring it up. Let's say if I bring it up to say 50 or something like that, it will be a little bit flatter, a little bit more orthographic. So again, it just depends on how you want to shoot your scene. So do you want a wider lens or a longer lens? So I'm going to actually put this to about 28, and then go ahead and position my camera, the way that I want to create my scene. So I like a little bit of a wider lens for architectural. Gives it a little bit more perspective, a little bit more dynamic view. And so what I'm doing here when I look at this scene, as I'm trying to get this framed the way that I like it. Now, if I need some more help, I can certainly turn on some of these options here. So if I turn on Film gate or Resolution gate, actually Resolution gate's probably the better one, 'cause it shows me exactly when I'm rendering. You can see, I can position this, to get the view that I want. So I'm going to go ahead and adjust my view, to get exactly what I want. And then once I do, I'm going to leave the camera as is. So one of the things I can do is I can go back to the Channel Box, go View, select Camera, and then select all of these and just do Lock Selected. So what that does, is it makes it so I cannot move that camera. Now, if you want to you can unlock and again reposition your camera. So go ahead and align your camera, the way that you want, and then lock off that camera so we don't move it.

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