Defining camera position
One of the first things you'd want to do is control your camera. This is done through the RenderView plugin. You will always want to create and setup this plugin, exactly one, in your scenes. (The exception is when you are Texture Baking - then you'd use BakeView.)
The main parameters of the RenderView plugin are:
- transform - (default: identity transformation) A transformation (rotation + translation) which defines where the camera is and how it is rotated. The matrix is in column-major format and you will need to calculate it yourself. You can't set rotation angles as in most 3D software. The default camera orientation with identity matrix is so that +Z is pointing up and +Y is the view direction. If your scene uses +Y for up-axis, you will need to set V-Ray's scene up-axis accordingly - see the topic about Global settings, section on SettingsUnitsInfo.
- fov - (default: 0.785398 radians) The horizontal field of view in radians.
- focalDistance - (default: 1) Focus distance in scene units.
- clipping - (default: false) Enable the clipping planes.
- clipping_near - (default: 0.0) The near clipping plane
- clipping_far - (default: 1e18) The far clipping plane
- zoom - (default: 1.0) Zoom factor
- orthographic - (default: false) Enable to have orthographic projection instead of perspective.
For advanced camera effects, such as DoF, exposure, distortion, vignetting, etc. you will need to enable the physical camera in addition to RenderView. We'll cover these in a later chapter.
You can get different camera types such as fish-eye etc. by changing type in SettingsCamera, but we will be detailing this in the chapters on settings and the physical camera.