Welcome to setting up a camera for rendering in this video.
We're going to be learning about the camera placement there.
They are a directional object so a camera has a front to it and that's the bit we look through.
We're going to Overview the camera settings themselves and you can have more than one camera in the
scene but only one active camera.
And that's the one that you'll be rendering from the Nashi how to switch between nodes as well.
So let's hop over into blender.
Okay so over in blender I have opened up our chess scene that we've been working on.
I'm first of all going to unhide the pieces and the camera as it was hidden over here.
So I'm going to hold down control as I click the little eye in the outline.
Making sure that everything beneath the hierarchy is also unhidden.
We'll add our pieces in a moment but let's play with the camera.
First of all where is it.
So let's click on that camera.
And here it is.
It's tiny in our world space because our chessboards quite huge So we we've got a couple of design decisions
once the board is made we can always scale it but down nothing is a factor of 10 to large at the moment.
Alternatively we can play with it at this range and I'm going to play with it at this size and this
scale because it's going to highlight some of the issues you may have if you are rendering certain size
objects.
So the first thing we're going to do is see what the camera is currently seeing as a couple of ways
of doing that.
But the easiest one is to go down to view and we've got an option here for camera and it's num pad zero.
I don't have my number pad attached some guineas use the menu system at the moment.
So when we click that that's what our camera is currently seeing.
The rest of the greyed out area we cannot see.
So now when moving the camera about's you can literally use the G key like you would do any other time
it looks like we've got incremental snapping turned on.
Yes we have.
I'm just going to turn snapping off at the moment so we can move about now you can have more control
obviously by constraining to the x y and z axis.
Now what will happen when you're using the x y and z is it will lift it up and down globally.
But sometimes it's much more intuitive to switch to a local.
So if we press Z again where's it gone.
Well that labels us to zoom in and out.
There's something funny happening there.
That's interesting.
The camera seems to have a clipping range and we'll go into the camera options in a moment and play
about with that as well.
So we can set the camera forward and back as we can see there if we use x.
Not the least bechamel Let's move it first on X..
Well that's the Global X and then we can go X on the camera itself and move it from left to right and
locally y will be up and down as well.
This is great using the constraints the local constraints when you want to rotate the camera so when
you press are to rotate we get this kind of feeling a bit giddy.
Great for those more action shots I suppose.
But if we go.
Z and then Z again.
Sorry just said once.
In this case it will pan around like this this isn't panning this is actually rotating panning is moving
across the scene like this.
So there's lots of things you can do in order to set up quite a dynamic scene and you can move the camera
up and down and till you get to a place where you can see the whole board so I'm going to do that now
and we can see most of the board in this situation and I'm just going to move it across.
There we go.
I'm happy with that.
Apart from the fact for I can't see what's going on so what's going on there.
So with the camera selected in the properties pane there's also a camera icon and here it is.
I'm going to make this bit bigger so we can see what's going on.
So there's quite a few options here.
There's perspective for you which is on my default we can set it's orthographic which is great if you're
rendering up drawing someone but it's not going to look very realistic if you set it off graphic and
panoramic as well.
Then we got the focal length of the cael camera so that changes the focal length the lower that number
the more wide angle your view is going to be and it's set to millimetres at the moment.
So the next option down is shift which shifts the camera pans across essentially from the felt position
and why it will do up and down a great way of altering that and set that back to zero clipping.
Now this is when youre the start of the clipping is how close will it actually show you your objects
if youre really close to something you may get clipping issues right from the very beginning of your
model so we zoom in too far.
Now the end clipping that's what's causing this issue here.
And if we move that higher or lower you can eventually fill up the entire board in the camera view and
that's fine.
At this particular camera distance from it at 132 ish.
It's absolutely fine.
Camera there's a little drop down here in camera presets that's quite cool.
You can switch between real life cameras so that's a great way off.
If you're taking real footage and adding your rendering on top of it later on we'll get to things like
that.
You can match your camera that you've just use.
Brilliant and finally depth of field.
Well that's how you can keep one of your objects in focus and blur out the rest of the scene.
We're not going to go for anything like that at the moment.
We just want to render up our scene and see what it looks like now because this is the active camera
we can have more than one in a scene.
We can see what the rendering looks like straight away by going up to render and hitting render image.
And it will render the view we've currently got and the short cut for that is F 12.
When we do that we see we've got this image here now to change the settings of the render itself that's
over in the propertys with something that also looks like a camera on the far left.
And if we click on that we've got the couple of options including a button to render anyway.
Now further down here there are loads and loads of options and we're not going to go into detail at
the moment.
Suffice to say one of the most important ones is this resolution which is the resolution of the output
image.
And usually it's set up to default to 50 percent.
Now the issue of it being asset's 50 per cent is indeed 50 percent of that there so if you wanted a
10 ATP a high def image you'd have to wait for up to 100 per cent before hitting the render button here.
F 12 or up on me in for air head to nanah up on the info header render image and then we get a much
cleaner and crisp image as well.
But it does take longer.
In fact it takes about four times longer to do.
The difference between now there are further options further down the performance one is one of the
big ones for people playing about with the settings can improve and that is per computer basis depending
on how many calls you have whether you were in blender render at the moment or were only using the cpq
for rendering.
Then finally our output fold.
Now this is quite important because at the moments in the temporary folder but you can set that to somewhere
else as you generate your images you can have an output folder for them as you do.
And this is great because we can go to a P in G and later on we will set this up for when we're rendering
animations as well because it essentially will create a video for us.
So let's hop over and create a nother camera real quick so because we've done a rendering we're now
in the picture of you so we're going to have to change ourselves back to the 3-d view.
Excellent.
Okay so we've got our camera and it's actually way out here in our scene.
So I'm just going to duplicate that camera and put another one over here.
Now if we go to view camera again you see that was still on that original camera and not on any one
book because our new camera is selected what we can do is view.
Cameras.
And then set active object as camera.
When we do that.
This is the camera that we're now looking through.
And of course we're not looking at anything yet because I plunked it somewhere random in our scene.
So if I go and grab this new camera I'm going to actually move away so the moment you move away you
are no longer in the camera view.
I'm going to lift it up so it's above our board then I'm going to go view camera again.
Excellent.
I'm going to rotate that around it's own z axis.
So looking at it from there and I'm going to move it out ever so slightly.
So we can see more of the board here.
And now when we go render image it's the active camera that we render from so that we can render it
from that side.
And if we select the other camera go view.
Let's switch to 3-d view.
Go view cameras set active camera.
And again none zero.
If you've got that and then when we go to render again we get our or that's the same view of a clicked
on the wrong camera probably.
So let's go back to 3-d if you select that camera go to view cameras set active object as camera control
and nump had zero.
Then you can go up and say file.
Then you can go render render image.
And there we go.
So control and nump had zero will switch to a union camera.
You could do great things with this later on if you want an object to look at another object.
When we get to our characters etc. later on you can set up a camera with in that or just in front of
the person's face or when you're actually doing your animations and things like that or even your stills
you can guarantee that your your model is looking at another object in your scene or something like
that because that's what you're seeing through their eyes so to speak.
Okay.
So it's Challenge time.
I would like you to finish off the board and render it so you will need to append all of our pieces
into the scene.
The ones that we've got left to do duplicate the white pieces to create the black pieces and you'll
need to change the material so it's a black piece again and then set up the scene itself to be more
interesting than just a starting pose.
Finally remember to show your friend in the discussions so I can see how you guys have gotten on board
the video now and give that a go.
Okay guys.
Welcome back.
Let's finish off this board and render it.
So back over in blender Let's go and add unnecessary pieces.
So let's I'm struggling to move my board about for some bizarre reason.
I think I need to reset my view to fit current object.
You show view selected that.
Yes that sometimes happens if you zoom too far in or out.
I'm glad it happened so I could show you.
It does happen from time to time so we need to bring in some models so let's go and spend our.
We brought it.
We have brought in our bishops who don't need that.
Let's do the king objects King.
And I'm just going to go through and do every other one really quickly.
Knights objects.
Night.
Then in two.
Pend back out of here.
Queen.
Where are we here.
Objet.
Queen.
Append.
Rook object.
Ruk.
Brilliant.
All our pieces on top of one another.
Let's turn snapping to increments on since we're doing we're dealing with real world scale and we can
literally just move that guy over here and call the turn face snapping on.
I can move him and put him in the right place.
Brilliant.
In fact I do want.
Increment turned on an hour just to constrain the movement itself to the x y plane.
And then I can place exactly in the middle.
Let's grab the next one.
It's the king.
So the white pea The White Queen is on the white square say Hold be over here so that's grabbing constrain
TV's Z and put him there.
I think I'm going to have the night next.
Well let's grab him and constrain him to the z axis.
Put in there.
We've got now we've got the queen.
Excellent.
So again let's move her to there.
Brilliant.
So we just want to.
Duplicate linked our.
Rook and our knights.
Now they look slightly different colours.
I am a look at the rock is incomplete the wrong place.
I am a little concerned that the normals may be around the wrong way on those particular models.
I'm not sure if they are or not and it looks like these are now floating some I'm going to delete those
and do them again because when I moved them I didn't constrain it to be this duplicates it linked.
Duplicate linked.
Then move the new one over here.
Perfect and do the same with our rock.
Excellent.
So those are all those pieces there I do want to just go into the mesh objects themselves just go into
this one here edit it select everything within the mesh itself and then we're going to.
Get control n just to make sure the normals are the right way round and will do the same to the rook
itself it may be that they've not got the white material applied to them as well so let's go and check
that out.
No art.
No they don't.
So white squared.
K..
NONE of these appear to have a white material on them yet.
Some might be worthwhile doing that.
Now let's call this material white piece.
Excellent.
And let's make it's quite specular I want my pieces to be shiny and as white as it can be.
There we go.
That's that set up.
Now here we can use this dropdown and apply a white piece and it applies across.
I'm just going to do the same to all of the pieces.
Now whilst I'm thinking about it.
White piece and then the porn at the front as well.
It in that's a white piece will do them all because they're all linked.
So that's our board basically set up and we've got a bit of organization to do in the hierarchy so let's
do that now let's put all of these.
I'm going to create a layer of hierarchy and just to keep things organized himself so I'm going to add
an empty and call it nights so I can keep That's just a plain axis and call them nights.
White.
Just realize if I'm going to duplicate this I'm going to have to do a lot of renaming may not do for
the purposes of this exercise.
I'm going to put the white knights in there and then the white knight in the white pieces and then a
poly King can go in the low poly queen and go in the rock themselves because it's implied by white pieces
itself.
So anything in here says white it can be truncated just bishops nigh sup plural and porns.
They're absolutely fine.
It's implicit that they're white as they're under the white pieces.
I'm going to join the rooke's together as well so let's add just the right shortcut.
Add a empty called the plain exis have been nice for it to be over the Rockies self.
So let's do that again.
Empty plane axis and call it rocks.
And put those under rocks.
And put rooks under white pieces and then we've got a nice tidy hierarchy here.
So we got our lighting and our white pieces.
So then we should be able to select all of our objects underneath by holding down and trowing clicking.
The little mesh icon there the little empty icon.
And now I should be able.
I don't want to I don't want to jib Kate links.
I actually want to do a separate duplication at this point.
And there we go.
Got our other pieces and I'm going to constrain it's fixed by plane and pop them.
They're obviously they're round the wrong way at the moment so we can rotate on the z axis by 180.
And they've moved round.
And we need to bring them forward again and probably move them across.
So they're in the right position.
Excellent.
And white pieces 0 1 so call this black pieces.
Excellent.
So white pieces black pieces we just need to colour them in the appropriate colour.
So them being as they are we need to create a new material so that's bring the properties pain back
up so we can sit and create a new material going to call it.
So now you can call it black pieces.
Excellent.
And I'm going to set the colour so black unsurprisingly I'm still going to give it a lot of spec clarity
so it's got a nice sheen to it.
So 100 percent on both.
I'm not sure obviously will.
We may edit this in the render in a moment.
So we've got those there.
And finally let's finally let's apply that to our models.
I don't mean to grab that too but this here black piece is excellent.
This one here looks like it's what the white piece applied to it so let's remove that and we've got
the black piece there done and here.
Let's remove that material and add black pieces and do the same on the rest of our models here apply
black pieces here.
Remove that material and apply it black pieces and two more models to go.
It's no longer a white King it's a black king.
And our final thing here is to make the queen black as well.
So there we go.
That's all that are roughed out.
Let's see how it looks in rended mode.
So let's go and view it from the camera.
So we've got our angle right.
That's absolutely fine and render our image.
Wow.
Excellent.
So let's zoom in there see how that looks.
I'm I really like fat.
That's absolutely brilliant that's turned out wonderful.
Couple of things the side could do here is move the pieces about I'll leave you to do that some running
rapidly out of time.
And of course the king and queen on the black side are currently on the wrong squares as well.
I'd love to see your renders in the discussions.
Please share and I will see you in the next lecture.