Original subtitles

- [Pierre] In this video,

we will see how Blender's camera work and how to use it.

I've created a little scene including a camera

that we can find also in the outliner.

To switch back into camera view,

you just have to press zero on the numpad.

We can find our camera object, named the camera,

and the camera properties in the properties editor.

You can place the camera by moving it

and rotating it as you will do with any other object.

Or you can frame the view in the 3D viewport

and press Control + Alt + zero

so that the camera view will match your current custom view.

The camera format is on the output size of your document.

Basically the ratio of the output image.

between its width and it's height,

the resolution doesn't matter, only the ratio matter.

There are different camera type.

By default, the camera type will be set to perspective

and the output is the same as in the perspective view.

If we switch to autographic,

the autographic scale will allow you to zoom in and out.

You can't zoom by moving the camera.

Using cycle, you can also switch to panoramic.

It won't be supported in Evi, because you need ray tracing.

It allows you to do a free 60 degree angle point of view

ideal for VR experiences or to create your own HDRi.

With the prospective camera,

playing with the focal length

will allow you to zoom in and out.

The longer the focal length,

the more zoomed will be your picture.

And the more compressed will be the perspective,

meaning that you will get closer and closer

to an autographic view.

The smaller the focal length,

the wider will be your angle of view, or less zoomed,

and you will create a lot of distortion in the perspective.

You can shift the camera frame on the X and Y axis.

It doesn't exactly behave as a rotation.

It's currently of setting the position of the camera

on the left of the right, but we keep the same perspective

as when we are framing the center of the view.

I personally never used this option.

To better understand clipping,

I will go into the viewport display and enable limits.

A line appear in our 3D viewport, showing these limits.

This limit line show us the clipping distance.

If I increase the clipping start,

it will move away the first polygon

that is rendered by the camera

and we can see the limit line updating in our 3D view.

On the other end, changing the end value

will change how far a can be from the camera

and being rendered.

As you may know, computers, don't like infinity

and we can't render an image with an infinite depth.

The calculation would never end.

Real camera have a physical sensor

that allow them to capture the image.

But with our virtual camera,

the only thing we have to know

is that the zoom or angle view

is a ratio between the focal length and the sensor size.

So basically you may never change this value

and only play with the focal length.

You may not need to use the safe area that much.

When enabled, you will see frame appearing

in your camera view.

They were origin only here to fit different screen sizes.

All TV may not have the same image ratio

and sometime the image was clipped.

So you could use this to set the limit

between what could be cut and what is currently in frame.

But now most of our screen

do compensate the screen differences.

But they are still great if you want to set a title,

for example, in your frame or if you want to add subtitle,

knowing that a part of the picture

will be occluded by the subtitle

and making sure that you keep all the focal points

inside the inner frames.

You can add the background image as you will do

in the 3D viewport.

And under viewpoint display,

you can display a lot of information regarding your camera.

We can already see our creeping range,

but we will also be able to enable the limit of the mist.

It's currently overlaid upon the limit,

so it's a bit hard to see,

but we'll see it better just after.

The mist pass is to be used in the compositing.

So to be able to access it,

you have to go to the render layers and enable it.

Then we need to render our picture.

It will generate a black and white picture,

the black being the closer to the camera

and the white the further away.

Any rendered value closer to camera

and the start limit will be black,

any rendered value beyond the end value of the limit

will be white.

This is a path very useful to give depth to your render,

creating atmospherical perspective, like fog for example.

To change its limit,

you have to have it enabled in the layer

and then go to the world properties

and go in the mist path tab.

Here, you will Find the option to change the limits

and also the falloff behavior.

The sensor will display the focal point of the camera,

so we'll see that a little later.

The name option will display the name of the camera

just under the camera view.

The passepartout option

will allow you to increase the opacity of the passepartout

to currently occlude what's outside of the camera.

When working on the shot, I advise you to double check it

with the passepartout alpha set to one.

Because the fact that you see

beyond the boundaries of the camera is misleading.

It seems that the composition is wider or more open

and you can anticipate what's outside

of what you're framing.

And so you are mentally anticipating

the motion of your character or where he's going

and what is going to be in the camera shot,

which in the end, won't be displayed in the current shots

you are filming.

In the previous video,

I've explained you how composition was important,

how you have to try to give sense

to everything you're doing.

In this regard, composition guides are super useful.

You would find several of them

are related to different composition theory,

like the golden ratio.

So if you have studied composition through hub, for example,

you won't be lost.

If you're not that used to it, just use the third,

it's the most important thing.

Make sure that the important part of your shot

are inside the third or aligned with them.

For example, I'm aligning the head of my character

with the top right third,

and he's looking toward deep open third.

If I move him on the other side,

we still have a focus on him

but that fact that he's looking

at the closed side of the camera

leads your audience to watch outside of the frame.

And unless this is an artistic choice

it doesn't look great that much.

So what we can do is just rotate the character

and keep him aligned on those third,

but it will look at the other side of the screen

on the open side,

and then offset this fear on the foreground

because it's occluding the first third.

And so it becomes a point of interest

while it might not be something very interesting,

unless your character is watching it for example.

But simply moving it on the side

make the competition a little better.

Composition in itself is a big topic

and will deserve a whole course.

But you can start with those simple rules

to make opening compositions.

Let's now have a look to depth of field.

When activated, you might not see the different away.

What you have to know first

is that Blender is currently focusing on this target

and we can move it directly in the 3D viewport

by left clicking and dragging

or changing the focus distance here.

Using the eyedropper, you can also select an object,

asking lender to keep it in focus.

To make it clearer, let's reduce the f-stop to 0.1.

This will make our picture way more blurry

and we can see that even if I move the camera

or I move the sphere, Blender will keep the sphere in focus

meaning that it won't be blurred

while everything else around it gets blurry.

If I want to select another object to focus on

I can select it through the menu.

If I select the ground,

you can see that the focus point is aligned

with the origin of the ground object.

Not the whole object is in focus.

This is a pretty important information.

Blender will use the origin of any object

that is used as a focus object.

Finally, you can copy the name of the object

you want to focus on

and hovering over the focus object slot, press Control + V.

Let's talk a bit about the f-stop.

Here I'm focusing on the first sphere

so we can see the cube on the left is perfectly in focus.

If I now move away the focus point

we can see that the next cube is in focus.

I will get back to the previous

and we can see it's back in focus.

Increasing the f-stop will visually reduce the noise,

but it's not about this.

The f-stop value is the range of what is in focus.

The higher f-stop value, the higher the range

from the focus point will be in focus.

Plus the further away is the focal point from the camera,

the larger will be the focus area.

To give you an example, if I use the same f-stop value

and I focus on the very first cube,

I might add two cube in focus.

While if I focus on a cube that is further away

I might have four or five or six cube in focus.

So the focus range gets bigger,

the further away the focus point is.

The other concern is that the depth of field

is based on a distance.

So depending on the scale of your scene,

the blur effect behavior might look different

and you may have to play with a bigger range of f-stop value

to see a difference in the blur.

It's pretty common to rig cameras with simple objects.

Adding an empty, parenting the camera to the empty

and make the empty rotate

to create a turntable, for example.

Another common technique is to use an empty

and make the camera through constraint, tracking this empty.

This way you can move the camera in space

and it will keep focus on whatever you are looking at.

It makes the camera easier to handle

and also animating the camera a bit easier.

But there is an issue.

As we are using multiple objects,

if I insert a key frame on those both empty

to create some kind of fancy camera motion,

I will have two different action, one per empty.

And if I start animating the properties of the camera

like the focal length,

it will create even another animation or action

just for those properties.

Then modifying the camera animation will be a pain

because I will have to update different actions.

Fortunately, Blender comes with a built-in add on

that will greatly help you.

If you go to edit preferences and go to the add on tab,

search for camera and activate the add camera rigs.

From there, when you press Shift + A to add the camera,

you will have the choice through different camera rigs.

The classic camera, the Dolly camera rig

and the Crane camera rig.

There is also a 2D camera rig

that we won't be using in this course.

While the Crane camera rig simulates a crane,

the Dolly camera rig is very close

but there is a little more freedom to it,

so we will use this one.

The camera rig is very close to our character rig.

There is a root bone that allow us to move the whole camera.

The aim controller allow us

to orientate the camera to this controller.

The camera controller allow us to move the camera in space

and it will still follow the aim,

while the offset will allow us to move the camera in space

but it won't rotate toward the aim.

And in addition to this, we have all the option

of the camera properties

that are exposed directly in the rig.

So we can animate those properties directly using the rig

and it will create only one action

that will gather all the emotions of the bone controllers

but also all the properties of the camera.

So I do advise you to use this rig all the time

so that you will get used to it, even for simple project.

This way you will get familiar with its mechanism

and also some of the feature it has,

like this focus point creation.

It will bind an empty 2D aim target

and the aim target will allow you

to rotate the camera but also set the focus distance.

To summarize, we have seen that the camera format

is based on the output resolution.

There on different camera type

with perspective and orthographic and even panoramic

that allow you to do a 360 degree angle shot.

You can control the zoom and angle of view

with the focal length.

You can use the composition guides

and the passepartout to better frame your shots.

You can control the depth of field

using the camera focus distance and the f-stop value.

It's highly advised to use a camera rig

to animate your camera.