Blender Essentials: Camera Basics

1. Master Blender Cameras Framing, Lenses Composition: Most Blender artists spend hours building a great scene only to lose its impact with a weak camera angle. In Blender essential camera basics, we're going to fix that. This practical course will teach you how to take full control of Blender camera system from creating, positioning, organizing and switching between multiple cameras. You will learn how to focal length and camera distance work together, how they affect perspective distortion, depth, scale, and even emotional feeling of a shot. We will compare wide angle clos ups with more controlled long lens views, so you can see exactly why two similarly framed images can feel completely different. We will also explore composition guides such as rule of words, diagonal slum ratio, triangle guides, set of framing and safe areas for wide screen, square and vertical content. To make the course practical, you will work inside a fully built Victorian style environment featuring architectural foliage, street props, lighting, and post Mannequin characters. The environment was adapted from our Blender Ultimate Environment Artist guide with compositions remodeled and selected buildings repurpres specifically for camera practice. This gives you real scenarios for creating environmental shots, architectural views, close ups, storytelling compositions, and depth of field renders. Finally, we will cover the problems that often slow artists down, including clipping missing objects, incorrect active cameras, broken depth of field, blank renders, V settings, noising, render regions, and exposure. So whether you create environments for folio artwork, thumbnails, animations, or symmatic renders, this course will give you the technical camera foundation knowledge needed to present your work with far more confidence. 2. Camera Basics & Scene Setup: Hello and welcome everyone to Blender Essentials Camera Basics. Now, when you open up a new Blender file, you'll be introduced with three objects, light source, cube, and camera. Camera is what we're going to be looking into within this course. You make use out of it. All you have to do is simply click F 12 on your viewport and it'll start rendering out your scene. Three D viewport that we currently see or Blender file in is simply a working view, but camera view shows exactly what the active camera will render. We can have multiple cameras in one scene, but Blender uses one active scene camera for the normal render. Let's go ahead and open ourselves up with a resource pack provided project. We're going to find ourselves a little scene with characters and whatnot inside a Victorian lovely setup. To make sure we can preview this in full glory before using cameras, we're going to make sure we go onto our render viewport shading. And before doing that, let's just make sure that we click on Render properties, and it's set to Cycles, GPU compute we are going to go a little bit more in depth in regards to this in our troubleshooting stage of the lesson. But that's going to be for now. This has the same preferences as we had before, so OptiX is selected. After all of that, we can just go ahead and go on to render viewport. So this will show you how it looks like with tracing on the entire scene, and the viewport is not the same as camera. If we were to click F 12 over here, it'll say an arrow that there's no camera in the scene. So if you're using a default scene and you have not deleted a camera, you can make use out of that set camera. Otherwise, in order to actually make use out of the camera, you'll need to create yourself a new one. So what you can do is you can click Shift and A and use the camera tab over here. By clicking on this, you'll spawn a camera on your Fred cursor. If you're not able to see it, you can use the dot on your numpad to kind of reposition the viewport to where the camera is. So over here, we can see that the camera is in the ground. I'm going to actually go onto material preview just so we could see a little better in smoother performance. Ray tracing is quite performance heavy after all. So if this camera still selected, we can click GZ and just move it up, like so, and this is the icon that we have for the camera. It is going to determine exactly what we see with our renderer. So if I set my camera up like this and click F 12, it will show you the exact type of an output that we're getting. By default, it might look a little bit zoomed into what you expect, but this is because we need to scroll or mouse wheel outwards a little bit just to kind of see the entire frame, like so, and this is what exactly we're getting out of the camera. So you might be wondering which way is it facing? How do we determine where is up, where is down and whatnot? And we're going to get to that in a moment. But before that, let's close down this tab and we'll be able to just see where the camera is. I actually have this camera spawn, but it's going to be in one of the outliners. On the right hand side, we have all the items in the scene, including all the meshes and all of well the lighting as well as the camera setups. Because I had a collection selected as a previous one, you might have the same kind of an issue where it's in the collection. We know it's in a collection because there is an icon over it that has a camera icon. To see it further, with the camera selected, what we can do, we can hover our mouse over our outliner, and we can click the same dot that navigated in our viewport, and that'll show you the exact type of selection that we have. So over here, we have the camera. To move the camera out onto the normal collection, what we can do is we can hover over our viewport or our outliner and click and then just use the moved collection to create a new collection or just put it in default collection just like that. But now we have the camera in our lovely collection just like so. I'm actually going to just simply click again, and the create camera collection. That way, it's going to be in its own collection just like that. And I'll make sure that this collection is selected. So if we create new cameras, we'll have all of the cameras in the same spot. So I think this is a good place to end our video, and we're going to continue on with this in the next lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 3. Managing Multiple Cameras: Hello, welcome back everyone to Blender essentials, camera basics. In the last lesson, we went over all the technical setups, and now we're just going to talk a little bit about how to control this set camera. So first things first, in order to access the camera, what we can do is we can just select this camera and we can click zero. This will give us this framework that we can see around our scene, going all the way around just like that. This is what the camera will see. And this is determined by the resolution of the camera. As well as the perspective, the focal length that we'll be talking about in the future. But what we need to know is that if you're not seeing this, you might be zoomed in too much. So whilst we are in that zero numpad view, we can use our mouse wheel to zoom in and out, and we can still see that the frame is there. So even though we're zooming in a lot more, if we were to render this, it would still render that said frame. So zooming in and out will not change that effect. To leave this camera view, we can click zero again, and then we'll see that we don't have a frame on our end, and we can just move our camera around like this. And the other thing that I'd like to mention is that if we click zero and we have this frame and try to move it outside, we're going to be naturally flung out or ejected from the camera. But there is a small little option that we can use we make sure that we're bounded to the camera whilst we're moving. So if we click N, we have options for this selection, and if we go on to view, we can select lock camera to view. This locks to camera, you can see the toggle button over here that it basically locks and unlocks. We can use this button as well, by the way, and it's going to be located on the right hand side when we are in the camera view, a little nice setup. So when it's locked, we can then move our viewport around using the same controls as the viewport itself, which is mouse button to rotate around, using scroll wheel to zoom in and out and using shift and middle mouse button to pan the camera around. So it's going to be exactly the same type of controls that you'd normally have. So with this, we're just going to go ahead and zoom out of the view and just position our camera a little better. Then we can just click on this lock again and now move out from it, and there we go. We're going to be having this camera like zone. Now, what happens when you have multiple cameras? What happens when you need to use different frames and you just want to make sure that they don't move around? Well, first things first, if you want to make sure that your camera never moves around, you can go to items by clicking N item Options, and in transformation, you can lock down the location as well as rotation. By doing this, by locking this around now, we can just select it, click G, and it's not going to move. Same thing will happen if we click zero on the Numpad and just simply use this lock and try to move it. I'll be stuck to us. So that's just one simple way if we have that perfect shot that we want to lock it down. We can just use that. And afterwards, if we are happy with moving it around, we can go back to this option and just click and hold and drag it down these logs to unlock it all, and then afterwards, we can start moving it around just like that again. That's pretty nice. Alright. So next up is going to be adding multiple cameras. Let's go ahead and click Shift and A and add another camera. Now we have two cameras like So. But which one is going to be used for rendering? If I click zero, it's still going to go back to this old camera. Well, that is determined by the scene camera option. If we go to the scene properties, we'll see that we have active camera over here set. So we have the camera and camera 001. We can rename this camera, so we can just say that it's camera A instead. I was able to just select the camera, click F two and just rename it. And right away, you can see that camera A is being used in the scene by using camera A. We can change this by just re selecting it over here. So now we're using a number camera. If we click zero, we're going to go to this outer camera and the other thing that I'd like to mention over here to reposition this camera can click on the frame itself. So on this visible frame without actually using the lock button, we can just select this when we are viewing from the camera. By clicking zero, we can select the frame, and then it actually selects the camera itself. So now I can click GZ and just move it as if I have this camera selected. So we are selecting it. We are moving it as an object, but we're still possessing that camera, so we're just moving along with it, which is quite a nice little feature. So going back to the selection of different cameras. What I'd like to mention is the arrow above the cameras. You'll notice that this arrow over here at the top is darkened. It's a black little triangle. But the upper camera has just a highlight around this triangle, meaning that this is not a selected camera, but the one that has the darkened triangle is the one that's selected. So if I was to just change the camera to camera A, you'll notice that now it gets that square back. So just like that, we'll know which exact camera is the other thing that I'd like to mention is that not only are you able to see it via this icon, you're also able to see it via outliner, as well. On the outliner, next to the text, next to the camera name, you'll notice that you have these green cameras. One is highlighted and another one is not. These will indicate which is an active camera. If you want to switch the cameras, you can also just click on that green icon, and it'll automatically change up which camera is active. So just like that, we're able to just switch between those items. So you've seen camera A, and I click on this, and now it's the camera 001, just like that. A neat little option for changing cameras easily as well as once you have a selection, you can use Control and Numpad zero, and that'll basically do the same as zero as just clicking without control, but it'll also change up the active options, so you can see that now it's active. So by doing that, we can change around which camera we're possessing and which camera is active right away. Control and Numpad zero is going to allow you to basically jump between the cameras like so. You might be careful about it, though, because if you have an actual object selected, you can click Control Zero, and it will try to possess the object as well. So it'll try to possess whatever you have selected. If I have this lantern selected, click Control Zero. I'll try to possess it. So of course, it will also try to change the active camera as well. So over here, you'll see that we're not using the camera anymore, we're using an object, even though when we select it, we don't have those options. So there we go. You can just go ahead and just click on one of those cameras to go back to. Speaking of moving cameras around, I'd like to tell you a little bit about it. So they are, as far as Blender is concerned, an individual object. But when rendering, we are not going to see those cameras. They are just icons for us to see. What the render sees is something that is without overlays and without any gizmos. So if we have both of them disabled, you'll see that this is exactly what we see when rendering. Of course, with better lighting and whatnot. We're not going to see the icons. We're not going to see the camera. So if we have one of the cameras closer to the render, you won't have to worry about that other camera is going to be seeing it. So that's something worth noting. This is purely for visual sake in the viewport. When rendering, if I was to click F 12, you'll see that the camera itself is nowhere to be seen. So that's what I mean. There we go. So we can just click F 12 and it will render it. All of that is lovely stuff. If you don't like the shortcuts, of course, you have alternatives. So for example, for renderer, you can just click on the tab at the top and just use Render Image. Then also for the camera, you can just select the object. View the cameras in the same way. Instead of just using shortcut, you have an alternative. If you were to click on the View tab at the top, with the camera selected, you can just go on camera stab, and there are two options. Set active cameras frame and active camera. So we can just go ahead, for example, use active camera. You can see that we've been using these shortcuts over here, as it shows Numpad zero and control Numpad zero, and there we go. We can just jump between the cameras like so. All right. Feel free to familiarize yourself with a camera. It is an object just like any other, so you can click G to move it around. You can click R to rotate it, but be careful whilst rotating it like this. I recommend you if you have a global controls orientation setup, just mainly use Z value. So R z will allow you to rotate it, so this way, if I was just to have this camera selected, we have rotation just panning around if we were to try to use X, for example, it'll try to rotate it and not including the angle of the camera. So it might get tilted view going to be for next lesson. Alright, thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 4. Framing & Camera Movement: Hello, L one, welcome back everyone to Blender Essentials camera basics. In the last lesson, we went over the basic setup of multiple cameras. We're now going to make sure we go over exactly how to position and frame the camera. First things first is when we have the camera selected, we'd want to make sure we adjust it and move it around. If we click zero, we firstly have the frame setup over here. If we want to have a different type of ratio for the frame, we are going to be able to control this via the resolution. If you want to change the aspect of this frame, what we can do is we can go to the output properties, and in here, we'll find ourselves a resolution. By changing resolution X and Y, we're able to basically change up the frame. If we have X and Y, the same amount of pixels, 1080 by 1080, so we're just changing X to be the same as Y. See that now we have ourselves a frame that is more square. So this is great for something like just general renders and whatnot. But if we're doing things like thumbnails for YouTube or setting up a general ratio of a video or just a render that would be covering full screen, the general ratio is 16 by nine, and to get that, we can have just a default output resolution of 1920. 1080. This will give you a 1080 P resolution, basically, you'd see on something like YouTube, and it's usually the default setting that's great for the use. Next step is the actual movement. So previously, we talked how we can select the frame itself by just clicking on the line to make sure that the camera is selected. Then we can click G and we can move it around. So by just clicking G, able to move it around and pan it around based on the camera angle. So we click R Z and have this camera more to the side. Like, so by clicking G, we'll be able to pan around now more to the right side. Instead, if we have the camera more to position more to the side and click G, we are now going out of the platform. So just like that, we're able to move it out, like so. Other thing I'd like to mention is if we want to move it around, we can do it the same way that we'd have the motion of normal objects. So for example, this sign over here, if we were to move it with a global transformation, we could just click GX, and then it's going to move it in the world position. GY will move it, again, in a world position, even though this sign is rotated. But let's say we want the sign to move it forwards based on its angle. By changing the global to be local transform orientation, we'll be able to use Gx and now move it based at an angle, as you can see over here. So let's say we move it, we rotate Z, move this poster, and now click G and Y. We'll be able to move it even at a different angle. So it's based more on a rotation. The same applies to the camera as well. So right now, because our camera over here is tilted, we'll be able to use Z. Oh, our Z will basically give us the tilt, but our X will be able to give us a nice angle. Now, as for the camera, if we were to click G and X, we'll be able to move it around like. So if we click zero, we can use GX to just move it based on an angle. GY will be able to move it back and forth, and GZ will be able to allow us to go back and forth like that. So my recommendation is we can either just use the view. Option use a log camera to view. Then simply reposition our camera. Like, so let's say we want to position this mannequin to show us that we are having a person just looking into the bookstore. So we have the book sign over here on the right side. We have the person over here, and we're just kind of getting it nice on position where it's more in the center of this person, whilst the background has the sign for the bookstore. So once we have the setup, we can then click back on the frame to make sure it's selected. We can then do fine tuning by clicking G Z to kind of go a little bit further, a little bit closer, like so, then GY to kind of move it up and down. So, for example, if we get too close to the ground, we'll start clipping, but that's why we're just at the moment, we're just making sure it's not too close to that. And once we get the setup that we're happy with, we'll be pretty much done. As an additional quick tip, if we have the transform ortation set to global, we have the camera selected. We can click G Z, and then it's going to move up and down. But if you click Z again, then it's going to allow us to move along the local axis. So at the top, you'll see along local axis. So the same goes for Y and X, so GX, and then it's going to be global at the top, you see. But if you click X again, it changes to local. So we don't really need to change the transformation orientation to be one or the other. We can just double click GY, Y, and then it just changes to local to adhere more to the camera. The other way to do it, Oh, let's not forget that when we are moving our viewport with the camera to view enabled, it's going to snap it out like so, but we can click Control Z and that's going to reset it. I'm just going to tick off camera to view now to show you an alternative solution. So another way to move the camera around in a more professional way, so we'd have more control is if we were to set ourselves up with foundational window. But going to the top right corner and clicking and dragging the corner itself, we'll be able to basically get two viewports, and we have one on the left and one on the right. So by having these two, we can hover over the right one and we can click zero, and that's going to give us the second viewport to be purely set for the camera presentation, just like that. So for example, maybe over here, I don't quite like the way the setup is. I can use the left side of the viewport, which is split now to just kind of slightly adjust it the way I want. So I want the R to be visible where the one lamp side is visible part of that lantern is seen, but we don't need to see the our side of it. And then you can use G Z to kind of move it a little bit. R Z as well to just rotate it a little bit and maybe a little bit more to the side. That'll be right. In certain cases where, for example, we're using local axis like R zz, I can give you a tilt. What you can do in this case, you can just click N, go to the transformation tab and check for rotations. For example, Y over here is slightly tilted. We can change it to be zero. Then I believe this yeah, we can just play around, see what it does. This one is right, and X rotation is also rotation for this. So that's also right. Playing around with these values, we can see what each one of them does. Alright, and afterwards, if we want to see it in the bigger view, we can use Control and space to kind of expand the entire viewport. So it's a nice little trick to kind of see the bigger picture and maybe do final tweaks on the frame. Like so. And here we go, something. So once we're happy with the setup, I also just realized I move this sign a little bit. I'm just going to rotate it until we get the good view. There we go. So it wouldn't attract unnecessary attention. And once we're happy with it, we can just check real quick the output. So we have the resolution. I'm also going to lower the maximum samples or the render. So if we go to render sample rate, we can turn down the max samples. I'm just going to use 200 as a preview. Then click F 12, and there we go. We got ourselves a lovely render preview. And there we go. We got ourselves at the final render. All right, so we can now go into image, save as, and just save this out where we you like it. I'll just go ahead and save it as one. Keep the rest of the output Cs for now. We can go ahead and click Saves image. Like so. And then we can even just go onto the camera over here and just kind of make some slight little tweaks, for example, maybe a little bit lower, maybe a little bit more to the right. We can use the Gizmo as if it was a normal object and just kind of slide it across, so as well. And just like that, we'd be able to get the exact type of shot that we want. What I would recommend in this scenario, if you're having two viewports open is that you can hover over your mouse at the very top and just scroll your mouse. Like, so until you get to the point where you can change the viewboard shading. So on the left hand side, for example, I would have something that's in just a solid viewpoard shading, so it would be less performance savvy, and I can still control it within my scene. But for the part where I want to make sure the composition is right, I can change this to a rendered viewport setup. And just like that, we'll be able to have the best of both worlds where we can control it on the left side and we can preview how it looks like on the right side. Alright, so that's going to be it from this lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 5. Focal Length & Perspective: Hello and welcome back everyone to Blender Essential camera basics. In the last lesson, we talked a little bit about the setup of the camera. We're now going to look into how to set up using the camera data itself. So previously, we did we looked into object data, which stores transformation and relationship to the whole scene, how it rotates and whatnot, to get the right frame. But now we are also going to look into the camera object data properties. So with the camera selected, we're going to go ahead and click on it and we have some options for the lens. Uh, first things first, we're going to go ahead and just simply create ourselves a new camera just to have a different perspective. We're going to go ahead and just create a camera. I'm going to go ahead and quickly reposition this one. So clicking view to camera view. And I'm going to click zero on the one that we just created. So we just created camera, so we can just go ahead and select it. There we go. We can now just zoom out and reposition our shot. So right now, we're just going to position our shot, so we are having the character who is walking out out of the subway be more in the frame. We're going to go ahead and just quickly rename this camera so underscore lens so we know which one is doing what? And we are going to start playing around with the way the lens works. So if we look at one of the options, we have focal lens. Changing focal length changes the field of view. I'm then going to be moving camera to restore the similar frame, and that change in camera position is what changes the perspective in relationship to it. You'll notice that even though the camera is not moving, visually, we do have a nice preview of the setup showing where the frame is going to reach up. So if we start increasing this focal length, we're going to stretch this out of the perspective, so from one end to another. And if we get it a bit closer, we get this kind of a field view that's more of a fish islands view type of setup. And the perspective from the dot to the frame in the viewport that we see from the side is basically nonexistent. So the distance between those two is there, the default, focal length is 50, so we can leave one as is. What's nice about having focal length is that it controls the visible relationship between the foreground and subject, well, to the background itself. If we have this camera as a sample, we can just make a duplicate. I'm going to click Shift D, then escape, and then I'm going to click G and Z Z. So we have the local push and we're going to push ano camera wide a bit closer. Then we can click zero, so we can just select the upper camera. I'm going to go ahead and just make the upper camera selected. Doesn't seem to want to do the trick. Let me just go ahead and take off the camera to view for Sarrus. There we go. So we have the duplicate. I'm just selecting the different shot. There we go. This one can be, for example, a much closer shot. But it can still give you the same frame that we had previously, and we can even match these two. Look at the first camera and see that it is right behind the duplicated one and it covers more of the frame, so we can see, part of the window and whatnot. So we can go back to this duplicate and we can just readjust it so it would basically be the same shot. So now we look from one end, go on the other end and there are basically identical, maybe a little bit more, there we go. The only difference, though, you might notice is that if we click controlled space, we have a little bit more distortion. So when we have the camera a little bit more to the back, we will have less and less distortion. But when we have it closer up, we'll have more distortion. If we make this a little bit more extreme, have this camera Gs, just kind of get a little bit closer to the person and then try to get the same amount of frame, for example, for the window inside. We'll see that the distortion that we're getting over here is going to be a little bit more extreme. So the items that are closer to the center, they're going to be scaled upwards whilst the items are a little bit more to the side. They are just kind of skewed in perspective. I'm going to just simply duplicate this camer again and this time I'm going to click G Z Z and just kind of bring it way, way back. G z, just to keep on bringing it. Until we get to this, I'm going to make the camera active again and I'm going to click zero, and this is what we're seeing. So even more, I would say G Z. We can just bring it out like so. And now, if we make the camera lens way more extreme zooming into this section, we're going to get something like this. So the further the camera is and more extreme the focal lens we're having the closer to an orthographic view we're going to get essentially. This looks flatter because the camera is far away, but it is still a perspective camera. Orthographic projection is a separate camera style, which we're going to be learning in a later lesson. With the scale, whether it's further items or closer items, they're going to be, well, almost identical. So we have an object over here on the side, for example, these pillars, we have the poster on the side and the human. So they have different varying distances, but even so, end up having them look in exactly the same scale, even though in their position in the world is completely different. So that's what I mean by orthographic. Whereas in comparison, the one that we had extreme close up, you can see that the human and the sign, for example, are going to be way different in terms of the scale. So if we bring it even closer to the camera or this sign with a low lens, going to have an effect where it basically makes it seem that sign is actually way bigger than an object, which should be given the perspective, the extreme perspective, the relationship to the closeness of your camera. And again, if I go back, you can see that now the object human to the sign are basically, there is no distortion because the camera is so far away, the distance from the camera is almost identical. And yeah, we're getting more and more to that orthographic. So just like that, by having three different cameras in the scene, we end up having completely different perspectives. To end it off, I just want to say that there is no universally correct vocal length. You have to choose the position first for the spatial feeling that you want and then choose the type of lens and distance that produces the required frame. For me personally, I want to use I like to use more of a distance, a lens where I don't want a distortion, I want the frame to look more controlled and whatnot. And a close up shot gives a good indicator of more panic, more chaos. So for example, let's say this person forgot something back home and he just kind of paused, you know, how would we indicate that? Well, by having a camera be extremely close up to the face like that and having the focal length a little bit distorting the person even you could get some extremely close up shot, and that would make it feel like there is a sense of panic because of that extreme close up. So that wouldn't quite work with another focal length if it was from a distance because it would just look too controlled to sterile as a shot. Something like that, again, is just a personal preference, and I'm sure there's artists out there who would be able to get some panicky with, especially some background playing out. Or I can imagine like a massive battlefield or something of that sort with, like, just a camera from a distance and up up focal length millimeters. It would definitely be really cool. But as for now, the close up shot that we're having here, if we were to render it, this is what we would get, basically. Nice and up close and personal, and the distortion makes it seem like it's a little extreme. But, yeah, I think that's going to be it from this lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 6. Orthographic Views & Shift: Hello, and welcome back over on to Blender Essentials camera basics. In last lesson, we talked a little bit about the focal length and how we can use that in our advantage to help us distort some of the shots. Or vice versa, if we bring it out, how we can just make the distortion less and less visible almost like it is an orthographic view. Speaking of orthographic view, let's go on to camera A, and I'm going to just make it our active. And then we're going to play around with the type. We have perspective type, which we can change it to orthographic. So orthographic will essentially remove any of the perspective. You can have a look at the way it looks like on our setup, and it basically flattens out the camera instead of giving us that distortion, a sort of a triangle coming from a single point. Orthographic view essentially gives us a frame, and that frame will have all of its pixels being rendered in a straight line, meaning that there is no difference in scale. We can have this camera, for example, to be way up close to this oh, this person. So with orthographic shot, it doesn't matter the location of the camera, whether it's up close and personal to the character or if we click ZZ and move it outwards all the way to the back. I will not matter because the same frame will be kept. It basically fires off the render in the straight line. It doesn't, push it outwards. It just goes straight into the scene. So no matter how close or how far it is the same shot will be visible. Um, now, if you want to have more of the shot, what you can do is you can change something called orthographic scale. In here, if you were to change it, you can actually bring out the scene to be much larger the frame for the camera that is, and you can capture an entire scene. And just like that, for example, you could get a really nice visual effect where nothing is distorted. The same scale is applied throughout the entire scene. And you'll have a lovely little setup just like that. So you can go ahead and click F 12 and grab yet another shot. Now, one of the things that I'd like to mention is that orthographic scale doesn't have to be changed through this parameter over here. You can actually grab whether you are outside of a camera or inside of the camera. You can grab the frame itself, and using your left mouse button, you can just move this frame in and out. And I recommend you doing it whilst your frame is actually an active shot because that way, and just have a really nice control over the setup. By grabbing it and moving it left, you're zooming it out, and by grabbing it and moving it right, you are pinching it in. Basically, that's how it works. Now, if you want to use the orthographic view for more of architectural designs, sort of diagrams or just isometric style presentation, you need to have a camera where it is a perfect angle, sort of like this angle so where you have angle where it's just perfectly diagonal to the shape of your environment. And to do that, we're going to just jump back in. We can click N and we can change the rotation. Rotation can be 45 degrees X and 45 degrees Z. That way, you'll notice that the angle is now perfectly diagonal, basically going neither horizontal nor vertically, but perfect in between. And it's also angled not in X direction or Y direction. It's angled perfectly in between. So now if we were to just move the camera a little bit higher we'll be able to get this lovely shot where everything is visible and it's so nice. I like this kind of a shot. It gives you, well, that perfect orthographic type of a view. And then afterwards, we just have to grab the frame and just kind of maybe reposition it to where we want it to be. For example, maybe we want to grab the entire scene. We can just go ahead and do that, like so, and then click Ftwelve and render your next shot. Just like that, we'll have ourselves a scene with a perfect orthographic view, which we can then save it out. Alright, next up that I'd like to mention in this lesson as well is that if you have, well, let's go ahead and just use camera to view over here. If you have a setup where you are, like, just constantly zooming in, let me just go ahead and grab this camera and set G Z, Z, and just kind of pull it in. If you have a setup where you are constantly zooming in, you might notice that there is some artifacts, some bit of clipping going on. So what's going on with that? Well, that depends on the setup that you have. First of all, you need to consider that the camera itself might be in the scene. So that's very visible with orthographic. If you are in perspective, you'll notice right away that maybe you just are a little bit too close with the shot. So where would I find my camera that is? And if I zoom in, you'll see that the camera starts going into I'm going to select this character real quick. Click on the dot, and that way, we can just refocus our camera. What I want to say is that if we have a camera too close, it'll start clipping through an object. So it's obvious when it comes to I'll be obvious when you come to close with the perspective because you'll basically have a view that's just partially blocked by something. With orthographic view, it's a little bit harder to say because it grabs the entire shot and you can see some of the parts are basically kind of cut off. Be a cool effect, but one of the reasons that this is happening is, well, maybe your camera is overlapping with the view. And another thing is that you'll notice that this, for example, part is not actually overlapping. The origin point of the perspective is not overlapping, so we should be able to see it. The reason we're not able to see it is because we have something called clip start and end. This is the range that the camera by default is going to grab. If we lower this for the clip start to 0.01, you'll notice that this clipping ends, which might be great. You might consider it to be a great thing to just make this value to be 0.00, 01 or something like that, and you might be thinking that this is a great, why would it not be set up by default? Well, if the values are too extreme between a clip start and clip end, the items that might be overlapping will end up glitching out, basically. They won't be able to determine which items end up being too close or too far ton object. So for example, let's say I have this bench that is, well, you can leave it as this. You can see that there are some black spots over here, for example. If we start playing around with value 0.001 instead will cause some issues. So right now, maybe it's not too extreme a value. If I was to change the end value to more of an extreme value, if you have the range between those two values too large for what you're trying to get, you might start getting some artifacts that are not meant to be there. So, for example, meshes might start to just start glitching out and whatnot. Obviously, you don't want this to happen. The other thing, going back to orthographic real quick, if we have it well, too close, like, so it might help you to elevate some of that. So if we have 0.001, you can see that the clipping is slightly elevated, of course. It's not going to help here because it's still overlapping into the scene, so we need to push this outwards. We make sure we fix it. But if the value over here was too small, you'd still have some clipping, even though it's not going into the scene. So it's just fine tuning between that. The value, by the way, of end we have over here. It's something that's going to help you basically tell how far or how close we have the last object in the scene. If we have this something set to 10 meters, you'll start seeing clipping. So even though orthographic view doesn't perceive perspective, it still determines where the start and end point of clipping is, which in turn, well, causes some really bizarre setups where you can't see, for example, the back, but this can be very useful in cases where you actually want specific control over your scenes, so for example, I want only the bushes to be visible. We can fine tune this and maybe set it to 15, like so, and there we go. We'll have a scene where it's just visible for the person and the bushes and just a nice gradient background or even transparent background. That would also work. So it's a nice little trick and feature to kind of bake what's in the back if we were to render We'd have something like this, which needs a little bit fine tuning. So of course, where you'd want to use a high value for the end is when you have large scenes. So for example, you're working with, like, planets or something and you actually want to have true scale. You don't want to upscale the endpoint over here. Of course, clip Start would then have to be way different as well, depending on the setup. But yeah, if you ever have a setup where your endpoint makes the scene go away, this is the reason why because the clip end point is not far enough. The final thing that I'd like to mention here is the shift X and shift Y. If we look at the visualizer into our icon for the camera, when we are shifting X and shifting Y, we end up just tilting the entire camera, which is very, very interesting result. Shifting moves the framing without rotating the camera object. Shift Y moves the projection vertically, allowing us to include more of the upper or lower scene while keeping the camera level. This is especially useful for architecture because the vertical lines remain more straightened. We don't get such as distortion. From a lower lens. Let's say we have this character over here. We could rotate the camera to get the right type of a shot, but you can see that it's just not while giving us feet too much of the character, and it's not giving you the full context of the buildings. But if we set it up like so, and we start shifting y, we end up actually pushing the items outwards and keeping the I was just selected and keeping the character in proportion. By just doing that, we're able to grab more of the items in the background, which I find it pretty cool. Or if you want the opposite where you want more of the character, for example, in the frame, I ended up just tilting it the opposite way. And now you see the tilt being visualized, like so where it basically tries to grab items more that's in the front at the bottom and just kind of pans out to the back in our camera, meaning that less of the things are visible. And we can get some interesting shots like this where one person is chilling and another person is As a summary, lens shift changes the framing without tilting the camera. So for architectural work, it is a clean way to include more of the building while preserving vertical lines or or some more human shots. And this kind of lens shift changes is also great for orthographic view as well, especially for architectural work where it is going to give you a clean way to include more of the building while preserving the vertical lines. 7. Composition Guides & Safe Areas: Hello, and welcome back front to Blender Essentials camera basics. In the last lesson, we left ourselves talking about a little bit about perspective, how to tilt our camera. And now we're going to move on to another stage to help us visualize camera composition. So first things first, we're going to again create ourselves a new camera just to kind of help ourselves a little bit. We're going to just rename it, call it a camera visualizer. Like so, and we are going to just make sure that it is an active camera like so, click, well, onto camera to view. Now with that set, we can just draw els out towards like so. Alright, so what I mean by camera visualizers? First of all, within the setup, we have within the data objects properties, we have option four, Pass part out. So this one is an interesting one. If I was to make this frame a little bit larger, we can see what's going to happen. You might have noticed that around the camera, it's a little bit darker. And the reason for that is because it basically shows the highlighted area of the camera. We can control this using the pass part out. If we were to increase this all the way to one, we would have an entire area outside of the camera blackened out. Just make sure that if you don't have this type of view, if you have the camera to view turned off, you can just zoom out a little bit. So if the entire frame is too close and you're not seeing the frame of the camera, making it active or clicking zero, you might have a problem where you are just too closely zoomed in, so make sure you zoom out. Once you have that, you can control this opacity. So default value of 0.5 is most other cases quite right, but having it as 0.8 in certain cases is pretty helpful, especially considering the frame setup. You can also turn that off. By default, this should be turned on, but by turning it off, you have an entire view of the usual setup just with the frame included. This camera frame is tied to the output of aspect ratio. Content outside a frame is not part of a normal render. So the pass part out helps us judge only what the viewer will receive. And again, if you want to go and change the frame, just make sure to use the resolution in the output properties. Next up, we have compositor guides. So these are the usual rules for composition. We have rule of forts. We have a center to show where the center is and diagonal as well to give us a nice depth perception, golden ratio as well. As triangle A and B to just kind of help us with the compositing. So if you're not seeing these lines by the way, make sure you have the overlay show overlay turned on because if this is off, we won't be able to see such lines. Now, going back to camera to view to make sure we're able to move the camera with the viewport controls, we can set ourselves up with certain control. So for example, right now, viewport overlay also shows the skeletal mesh. We don't want that. Maybe we don't want any of the cameras also to be seen. If it's getting in our way, we can always just go on to overlay settings and just turn everything off except for the camera guide. So this is what controls basically the overline of our camera. If we have everything else turned off, like, for example, set bones, we would still have the setup, that's quite nice. So how would we use it? Well, for example, I really like the triangle A or triangle B to help us with the composition. Previously, we already did this shot boot. We could, for example, reposition it where we are able to have our characters perfectly placed in. Now, this will give you a perfect composition. If you were to render it, you're going to get a lovely setup. As it will basically help to direct the eye through the scene. Now, next up is, well, rule of words. We had that already enabled, and I forgot to mention I would recommend you to just have one compositor guides enabled. So previously, we had two of them enabled. We could have all of them enabled, but I highly not recommend because it just turns everything into a mess. And if you want to see it a little bit better with the setup, you can change the color of your guides. You can make it, for example, make them whiter, or you can even change the color to kind of oppose to what the color is on the screen. So, for example, if I make it more pinkish, we could see a better contrast to this scene, just like Tad. So rule of Fort is great when we want to just make sure that everything is nicely fitting in the scene. So we could, for example, get a shot from this angle over here where the camera of a person is crossing this corner and the other side is basically here for this house over here. So I think that would be kind of a nice shot. Maybe we need to maybe re angle it a little bit, just like that. And that would be quite a reasonable shot as well. Like, so we could render it out and get ourselves the Fords compositor, as well here quite nicely. Story short. It can support balanced off center replacement. So if we have a camera that's slightly at an angle, it's a great use. And finally, the one that I extremely like if we go back to the visualizer camera is going to be the center or diagonal. So both of them are going to be helping find the center. So if we have a scene where, for example, we just want this lantern over here, the center of the shot or maybe just this corner, we can just position our camera to be right in the center where it's between those two people, and we get ourselves a lovely little setup just like that. That would be quite a nice random short. The diagonal version helps us with symmetry. So these kind of shots would be great if we have it in areas where there is an alley, for example, over here. We could set ourselves up with a lovely shot, and I'm just looking for a quick little example, maybe on the other side. Or if we want to capture up the shot of, for example, the character, going out of the subway, we can also have it so where you can see the lines kind of matching up the rail on the side. Maybe we just need to position it a little bit to the right. And just like that, it would also be quite a nice shot except we are missing something on the right hand side. If we look the left hand side is quite clustered using the compositor lines that also helps us to kind of determine what's missing and what's not. But this shot, for example, I would say we could, for example, put a bush on the side just to kind of help us with, well, the entire compositor. And just like that, we'd be able to balance it off a little more, and if we click Render, you'll see that the shot is quite reasonable, just like that. Now, what I really wanted to show you as one of my final thing is, if we were to go over here, we can have let me just go back onto the camera options and turn off the composite guides. You could use for most of the cases, it's actually quite helpful to have that. But the main thing that I wanted to show you would be limits, show limits. It's quite an interesting one. If we have denabled, we'll see a small cross in the middle. It's not going to be quite as visible from the camera itself, but if we go onto our preview from the side camera, we'll see we have some lines. And those lines we are able to make use out of to see where the limits of the camera. Which might not be quite as self explanatory. So let's go ahead and just quickly talk a little bit about that. So previously, we talked about clip start and clip end. It shows basically where the camera starts ranging from, where it ends. So the limit will show you where it ends and where it starts. If we have the clip start, just go out of it. Like so you can start seeing the dot coming out of the camera. So it starts basically going past this point and we basically start to clip the item in the scene. So that's pretty self explanatory. And the point at the end is also going to be doing the same, which is going to be at the very end. And if we start lowering it, we get it much, much closer to the scene setup. So for example, maybe for this type of setup, we don't really need to be more than 100 coming out, but we could lower it and fine tune it. No, sorry, 100. There we go. We could lower it and find tunit. Doesn't have to be perfect, but basically, you want the entire scene to be between those two starting point and endpoint. And the other thing that I'd like to mention is that we do have this X in the middle. This X is essentially depth of field. We're going to mention that. We're going to talk a little bit about that in the next lesson, but the depth of field is this part over here. If we enable it, we can just basically control the focus distance, and that dot, that cross is going to be showing where exactly we have the main focal point. Once we start blurring out the stuff in a foreground background, we're going to have this as its center point. Then the final thing that I'd like to mention is if I was to turn off the limits, and the final thing that I'd like to mention is going to be safe areas. So above the viewport display, we have safe areas option. When we take this on, this is going to give us small black outliners. And this will help us to, for example, set up a safer margin points. There are two options where it says, title safe margins, action safe margins, but essentially they do the same thing. We're able to control the ratio for the camera and basically determine what can be more visible and what can be less visible. For example, if we have title safe margins, I would recommend you just to kind of increase the Y value, so we could have some base part at the bottom. So we would know where exactly we need to maybe frame the shot. Let's say, we have a human over here, and this at the bottom could be left out part for, well, text and title, we'd know that it would be harder to see and out of that composition. And as for X, I would just usually keep it very close to the border. So the default value was actually quite right. And that would be great. The action safe margins, again, pretty much the same thing, but we need to just think of it as, like, if we don't want, for example, the hand to be cut out or something, we need to leave a little bit of a gap over here. So for that part, I would leave it more for X value increased. That way we could position the hand to be ending where this frame safe margin ends. And such, a setup is actually really good, especially for modern movies if you're making more modern movies where the ratio is 16 by nine resolution, this kind of ratio over here. But let's say you want to create some shorts out of your movies and you want to make sure it's able to easily transition from horizontal type of frame to more vertical where it would be more for handheld devices, for quick well, clips and whatnot. Action safe margins in that case would be quite a lot smaller. I think it would be a value of 0.5, and it would show you a vertical vertical setup. So that way, you could position your character to be always in that vertical shot. And even though it's set up with more of a setup like where it's 16 by nine ratio at the moment, you would still be able to easily change this to a vertical shot for those short videos. So in this case, for example, let's say we want both characters to be visible. The up character is doing something in the background, and this front character is talking about something, but we want both of them to be visible. We could, for example, change up the camera where it's within this safe margin point, and there we go. Now, both of the characters would be visible even if it's in a short format. So that is extremely, extremely good. Alright, so that's going to be it from this video. Thank you so much for watching, and we'll be seeing you in a bit. 8. Depth of Field & Focus: Hello, welcome back everyone to Blender Essentials camera basics. Now that we went over the visualizers, we're going to talk about depth of field. Let's go ahead and select the camera visualizer, the camera that we created. Let's click zero to go onto the camera, and we're just going to move it out onto a bit of a different angle, something like so for now, just to kind of help visualize what it does. So if we have the selection and we are in data object properties for the camera, we can find ourselves depth of field. Let's go ahead and enable that. And this will help us basically to control which distance appears sharp and which areas fall out of focus. And it is often used to guide the viewer toward the important subject and reduce the distractions. We're going to exaggerate it first. So if we were to just have the focus distance lower down, it'll start actually blurring everything out, like making everything out of focus. The reason everything is being out of focus right now is because we haven't properly set up the focus distance with the F stop value. But as you can see, everything is blurred out except for the visualizer parts, but if you don't want to see them, we can just turn off the show overlays, and there we go. Everything now is Blurry. And it's not because of the rendering issue. This is just because we have focused distance setting on extreme value. But let's go ahead and actually put this to an actual use. So the easiest way to make use out of depth of field is if we reposition the camera to where we want, for example, over here by the trees, I think it'll be great to see this character looking at the window. And right away, you can see that it starts blurring out the foliage part. So it's not actually going to be sharpened up like this. It'll help us to lower down the perception of the detail and help us well, perceive the character over here, but we need to actually have control over how much we want this to be blurring out. So right now, by default, it does a good job, but it's not quite there. If we were to, for example, want to do more of an extreme value, it will cause us an issue because it blurs everything out. So the easiest way to fix that is to make use out of focus on object. Focus on object will replace the focus distance and it'll automatically allow us to, for example, select this dummy over here. Now, this dummy is going to be the main focus in the shots, no matter how far away the camera is, how close it it's always going to be the main focus item, which is pretty good because we can position our camera to be next to these foliage items, and we can play around with the following aperture settings. So the main thing is the F stop. Lower F stop values create a shallower focus range and the stronger blur. So once we start taking this to a minimal value, we'll get a complete blur out of the foliage that was next to it, but you can still see that the character because he is the center of the focus, that's the one that's going to be still kept sharp. If we were to start increasing the F stop value, we'll see everything being sharpened up. So when I use it, generally, I use 1.4 A value of 1.4 is a low FtopGving stop strong and shallow depth of field effect. Around four is more moderate while high values keep more of a scene that is sharp. And we can turn up the value to four if we want to make sure that, for example, the foliage that's next to us is sharper, but not quite just a normal sharpness without a depth of field as you would see normally. So it still helps us to kind of drag the attention to the character. And now we have additional options underneath blade rotation and ratio. These will help you basically to fine tune that set blur. If I was to make this to a value of one, we can see what it does. So blades will allow you to kind of change the blades, change the shape of out of focus highlights. More blades generally make that shape appear rounder. We'll make the blurred out objects rounder. So if I were to increase it, so the leaves end up getting that more roundness that we see over here. If you hover over, it says that it's best to have it at least free for the visual effect. We could potentially keep it or we could just turn it off, set it to zero. But a value of three will help you do the trick. Then we also have ratio. So if we were to lower the ratio, it actually starts blurring out the values. Ratio stretches the blur shape from circular towards oval. So once we lower the ratio to a value of 0.1, we start seeing it more in horizontal lines. Rotation rotates the aperture blade shape. And if we have less blades, maybe it'll be a little bit more obvious. So just change the way it blurs out the entire setup. All of that is quite useful to help out with the type of exact focal setup you want to have. And we could have, for example, The other way you could make use out of this depth of field is, let's say we have let's turn off the focus object for now, so we're getting our way. Is to kind of make it seem like the setup is actually a miniature version of the scene. In order for us to do that, we could, for example, change up the length to be either 90 or 110, something of value between that. I find that to be working quite well. So it gives that same result as we were talking about before where it's almost orthographic view. You could imagine that the camera lens is just zooming into like a miniature version of the scene. And then going back to the focus distance, we could manually tune in the setup let's say at around 70 is quite right, and then we can just gradually increase F stop until we get some items blurred out while others kind of sharpened up in the section in the center. And I think something like that will make it seem like the setup is actually like a miniature version of some sort of environment or something. And there we go. So I manually tweaked it, so it would be more to the center of a piece. I kind of adjusted the camera a little bit, and we got ourselves setup where it's like, oddly sharp in comparison to the parts outside where it's more blurred out. And it makes it seem like it's actually a sort of a miniature world that we're seeing that we're looking down on. It's quite nice and lovely. Alright, so that's going to be it from this lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 9. Backgrounds & Transparent PNGs: Hello, and welcome back everyone to Blender Essentials camera Basic. Then now that we've learned a little bit more about the camera setup, let's go ahead and learn how to make use out of background setups. So let's go ahead and create a new camera for that, just to make sure we don't get it mixed up. I'm just going to select it and call it camera underscore background. So and just select it. So now we can click and have camera to view, click zero on the numpad and just zoom out until we get this shot. All right, so now that we have this kind of a setup, let's go onto the camera data object properties, and within here, we'll find something called background images. So we can enable this to help us with the reference on the positioning with the camera composition. So if we have this enabled, we can add an image and open ourselves up with an image. So I'm going to locate an image file that was prepared, and I will provide you with that in the reference as well. It's a simple background PNG. Once we open it up, we have this semi transparent type of setup. Want to see it fully, what's up with the image, we can just change the depth from back to front, and that will show us the full image. Of course, it's not visible just yet fully because we need to also change opacity to be set to one. This way, we can see the exact type of image that we're having. And even if we rotate a camera, nothing is going to happen, but this reference image is just going to stay in the position. So what's nice about reference images, the background images for the cameras is that we can use that to our advantage to make sure we just rotate and composite the camera with the right position and angle. Let's go back and change this back to depth to be back. And that's why everything that is modeled is going to be in front of us. Then next up, we should talk about fitting the image itself. As you can see, the left and right are not exactly fitting within our frame. We need to make sure it's better fitted. So for us to do that, we have few options. First of all, we have frame method. We can either use stretch or crop to have different fitting crop. We'll just zoom in until we crop out the parts that aren't fitted in for a perfect fit. Or alternatively, we have options for offsetting X and Y, rotation as well as scale. And we also have ability to flip and mirror basically the image if we want to. But yeah, having a manual scale, we can also do that. So once we have the image setup, we also need to probably have a little bit better of a visualizer. Right now, it's a little bit of because we have the grid view. First of all, so what I like to do is just simply turn off the gizmo, so we wouldn't see anything of the selection that would throw us off. And then when it comes to show overlays, if we were to just disable it, it would disable the image as well. So what I like to do is just go onto the arrow and just disable just the floor. That is more than enough to get the right type of a preview. So we can just zoom in, for example, we can get it be faced a little bit more like this, for example, and with the settings that we have, we can just basically have a preview where the angle, the rotation, everything lovely like that is going to be a little bit more fitted to what we see with the background. And now, once we are happy with that, the reality of things is that the camera itself, the background image that we're using, will not be part of the render. Once we render this, it's just going to be removing the background. So if we preview view as the render, for example, but now here in the background image stab, we can see that actual render itself is not going to have that. So what we need to do here? I'm just going to go ahead and click F and the camera to view the COV and zero numpad kind of go out of the camera. What we need to do basically is we need to enable transparency. There are essentially two ways which we can add image to the background. One would be using compositor tab over here, but we're not going to go into that because that would be a topic for another time. The other thing is adding a transparency and then just using external software. You add in the image, after which you will be able to basically make some finer tuning and whatnot, but we would essentially need the render. So in order for us to do that, we're going to go on to render properties, and within here, we're going to locate film tab, and within a film tab, there's going to be transparency tab. Once we enable it, we'll see that the background changes and we're not going to be able to see the background itself. The reason that this gradient turns into transparency is because technically, there's nothing there. The background itself is not a mesh. It is not a sky cube. I know some people prefer to, for example, create themselves up with sphere cubes and then just making it larger. And then inside, you'd have basically a sky sphere, then at an HGRI image and whatnot. With this type of setup, it won't quite work as well. The reason the transparency works with this type of background is because the shader tab as this set as a world texture. So if we don't have this, it would basically be this just a simple environment with no shading. So that's something worth noting. Another thing I'd like to mention is that transparency just disables the background itself. It doesn't actually disable the lighting coming from the shader. So we're still going to have all that lovely lighting from the ambience that we're getting from our environment. And finally, one more thing I'd like to mention here is if you are having some issues, for example, with some parts where it's not giving you the right transparency, there is some options to work with. So first things first is that we have a transparent glass option. If we have this enabled, so for example, for this lantern, we would be able to control how transparent the glass would be with this setup. So if we have it as zero, it's going to be basically almost solid. If we set it to one, the transparency is going to be giving us more of a transparency. So something worth playing if you're not getting the right results with something like Lantern, the default value of 0.1 would work quite well, though. And also, the other thing I'd like to mention is that we do have an option for pixel filter. Pixel filter width will allow us to basically control how sharp the edges are around our setup. Default value is 1.5, but if we were to increase it to a maximum value, it's just going to blur out and soften up the edges around this transparency. If we have it set to zero, it's going to be extremely sharp. But a value of 1.5 seems to do a good trick if you're having some issues with focal and depth setup in the camera, playing around with this option will help you to kind of work around with some artifacts that you might get in areas where there's some foliage and whatnot. So it's something worth knowing. Going back to the camera background, let's go ahead and just simply click F 12. I already have the camera setup. So it's going to render out this scene. This is what you should have. If you're not seeing this outcome in a render view, you need to make sure that you go on to render output itself, and I render output properties, there is something called color panel in the output tab. Within here, you need to make sure you select RGBA. A stands for Alpha. If it's just set to RGB, it's not going to grab that Alpha opacity. And if you're not having this, just make sure that you have file format set to PNG. That way, you'll be able to just save this out you can call it transparent. And there we go. When we open, we have this scene. Now, if I bring this to something like Photoshop, so we can put the background just like we had previously. We'll just need to upscale it a little bit, just like we had before, just a little bit, like so, and there we go. We have ourselves a nice little presentable setup. And we can even check, for example, the transparency in the glass. Might be alright, might need to be retouched a little bit. But all in all, I think that it turned out pretty well. With the help of the reference, we were able to get just the right type of angle to make a perfect shot. And even afterwards, it doesn't have to be the same kind of frame. We can, for example, move this around a little bit. We can readjust it, tweak it a little bit. But because the rotation and the let's say, lens is in the right position, we have the right distortion, we're going to get the perfect perfect setup. So, yeah, that's going to be it from this video. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 10. Track To & Walk Navigation: Hello, and welcome back around to Blender Essentials, scammer basics. Now we got most of the things out of the way. Let's go into some bit of an extra troubleshooting and additional tips. So first things first, when we have multiple viewports, we can have more than that. By the way, we can extend it from the corner. We can just right click in between and join them up, like so. And all of which is nice. But let's say we want to have the camera, this camera over here to be the main shot, and we want to have another camera to show us another shot in case we want to just compare it directly in Blender. How can we do that? Well, if we were to just select it by default, we can't exactly do it. If we were to select it and click zero, it's going to go onto our main camera which is selected for the active setup. So instead, what we need to do is we need to basically click N. We need to go onto view tab over here, and there is an option called local camera. Local camera by enabling it, you'll be able to tell exactly which camera to use for this specific viewpoint. So right now I want a 001 camera, so we're just going to go ahead and search for that, and it's going to be this one over here. And once we select it, click again, just go out of the way, you can see that this now is the main selected item in this viewport. If I hover my mouse over it and click Numpad zero, we'll get the other camera. So now we have two cameras, one for one. A viewport and for another viewport, which is pretty nice. Now, I'm just going to go ahead and turn that off when we don't need to, and we can just go back to using just a single camera. The other thing I'd like to mention is how we can use an object to track the position of the camera. So we can either use an item within the scene or we can create ourselves an empty object. I'm going to go ahead and click Shifting A and create an empty. Use either one of those. Doesn't matter. It's just for a preview because when we have this in the setup, don't actually see it in a render. So if I have the show overlay turned off, you'll see that this item is not visible. But what's nice about this object is that you can use it again, as any other object, meaning that if you have the camera selected, but it can be any of the cameras. Let's go ahead and just make sure it's set to active. Then we can use something called constraint. So this is a whole separate tab. Let's go onto it, and it's mainly used for animations and things like that. But the one that I like to also use for help with compositing is going to be called Track two. Track two is useful here because it lets us choose both the axes that point towards the target and axis that keeps the camera upright. If we were to select it, it's going to right away apply it as a sort of a modifier onto the camera. Now with this setup, we're just going to go ahead and we're going to use this pipette and select the empty object that we created. This way, it's always going to be where you are having this object. So you can see me moving around and it's always going to be in the center of the scene. What I'd like to mention is that if you're not seeing it the right way, it might be because the track axis might be off. If you have a different track axis, it's going to be a little bit off to the side. And the way it works, basically, if I select something like, X, X will be good example. If I select minus X, it's going to be basically to the side, so it can be used, I guess, as a way of a dolly option, so, but if you want to make sure that it always looks into the camera looks into that empty object, Z minus is the way to go. The reason for that is quite simple. Previously, as you remember, when we click G and then Z and Z again, we were using the local axis. So the local axis for the frame is being Z, and minus Z is basically the front whilst Z is the back. That's pretty much so the other thing I'd like to mention is that when we have the position, let's say we want to position this to be exactly the center of our character by the glass. So you might have some bit of issues with the camera. The type of issues I'm talking about here is that let's say it's a little bit tilted. The option, the camera is a little bit tilted. We have some actual items over here. So up, if we were to determine that Y is up, up axis gives Blender and upright reference. Setting it to Y helps prevent unwanted camera roll. Now with this setup, we can basically move around or empty object to have the right type of focus, and all works well. The other option in this setup is that because the Y is always up, we're not going to have that tilt effect. So previously, I've spoken a little bit about clam two that it kind of is a new version of Track two, but it doesn't work as well with the tilt when the empty object gets a little bit closer to the camera. That's what I find it personally. This one, however, seems to work much, much better when it comes to composition and setups like that. We also have an option target Z, which makes a camera use the target objects Z axis as its upright reference. So most of the cases, you can leave it off for a normal fixed target and enable it only when you deliberately want the camera orientation to follow the target. So if I have the item selected with target Z, and then start rotating this, you can see that it also follows the Z axis like, which is an interesting way of controlling the camera. Speaking of controls, this option, the constraint doesn't actually change anything in camera. If we were to hide this constraint using this icon over here, the e icon, able to basically get the original position of the camera, how we had it previously set up. And we can work actually in between them with the influence right now, it's set to one. We can set it to zero and then we get the original setup or we can have something in between. So maybe you want to have multiple frames, like one being the original one and one being the target. You can have the value of 0.5 and have the frame in between. So maybe you're doing a bit of a storytelling, for example, that would be quite a nice use of that. Finally, one more function that I'd like to mention is how we can make use out of walking in Blender itself. If I was just to click zero on numpad or just go out of the view, we can use shift and apostrophe on the keyboard like next to escape. We could enter into a fly mode. You're struggling to find it, you can just go simply onto view item on the tab navigation and use walk navigation, that'll allow you to basically enter this mode. If you want to exit it, you can simply hit Escape and there you have it, which is going to allow us to basically move around in our viewboard like that. If we hit tab, we're able to enable gravity and now we can actually walk in the scene. So this is actually quite useful if I was to enable this option with a camera being set on the viewboard. What I mean by that is if we were to just quickly create a new camera, let's go ahead and do that and just use zero, let's make sure that we enable this. We can also call this camera real quick walk camera, and we can make sure that we have the camera to view lock turned on. That way, when we use the shift and apostrophe, we can either fly around the view or we can use tab and drop into the scene. And now, basically having the POV shot, we can set ourselves up with an angle that would be done with an actual real camera and you'd get all the right type of items setups. There are controls at the bottom when we're using it, so all the buttons will be found at the bottom bar. Again, if I was to click on it, you can see that we have, for example, WASD, Q and E to go up and down. When we go into gravity mode, it's not going to work because we are in gravity mode, but we can use space to teleport. If you want more controls on this, you would have to go into edit preferences, and within the navigation, you have options for fly and walk, which you can change up if you'd like to. For example, you have the controls for the walk speed and all of that good stuff. And there is also a gravity option for view height. So default human height set for this scene is 1.6. If you want to make the character taller or shorter, you have that camera at a bit of a different angle, you are free to change this option. Alright, so that's going to be it from this lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 11. Fixes & Faster Rendering: Hello and welcome back room to Blender essentials camera basics. Now that we went over all of the items for the camera setup and composition. Let's go over a couple of troubleshooting pieces. So first things first, what I'd like to mention is that if you have multiple cameras and you are planning to have multiple renders in the scene, it can be a little bit overwhelming, especially when trying to figure out which camera is which. And if you especially have multiple setups of different viewport for the camera localization, as we talked previously, it would definitely be a little bit overwhelming with multiple cameras being on the scene. You wouldn't be able to tell which is which. So what I recommend you do is if you go onto camera properties, there is an option within viewport display called show name. By enabling show name, you'll be able to have a name at the bottom left of your camera frame, which is very, very handy. Unfortunately, if you go onto another camera, like so and then you'll notice that the name is also disabled. You would need to enable the name for every single one of the cameras. The easier way to do that is if you were to select all the cameras that you want, you can hold Alt and you can click on the name. If you had it enabled for the first camera, you can just click it again, and there we go. Now, all the cameras will have that option ticked on, so you'll be able to see exactly which type of a camera you are looking at. Whether it's like lens or the one that we set up with the background or just a walking perspective, camera A, all of that lovely stuff, we can easily see and get ourselves reminded which camera we're seeing on our viewport. Now, what happens if you want to have a different type of setup or placement of the camera. What if the camera ends up being placed into the ground itself. So, let's say we create a camera and then just have it selected as the main camera, click zero, and there we go. Every time this happens, it gets placed inside of the environment. So my recommendation would be to either go for plan A or Plan B. A being just simply using free Dcursor. Every object in Blender gets placed where the free Dcursor is. If you hold Shift and tap right mouse button, you're able to place it on another surface area. You can see this little dot right in our scene. So if I was to place it somewhere on a rooftop, when we click shift in A and place a camera, now we get the item on the well, rooftop. It's still in the ground though, so that's that. Maybe putting it on the walls would be a better choice. Something like on the side over here, then we can just place a camera, click zero, and there we go. I would be a little bit better of the setup. Or if you use the cursor icon over here, you can just tap anywhere you want, and then just drag it onto the screen, and there we go. We have ourselves a floating free de cursor with which help, we can just place the camera exactly where we want it to be in the middle of the center of the environment or whatnot, all of that lovely stuff. Alternatively, instead of using this method, what you can do for Plan B is if you create yourself a camera, you can use a little shortcut for it. Using Control Alt and Numpad zero, you'll be able to basically place your camera right where you had it in your viewport where you had the viewport, basically. So let's say I exit the camera over here with this still being my active, I can just put my viewport at the top, use Control Alt zero, and it's going to place the camera in exactly the same position as you had your viewport. Set, which is pretty handy. Now, one thing we didn't really talk much is, how are we going to deal with the fact that if we don't have a proper keyboard that has a nums, if you have a laptop, you might not have that. So I would recommend you to just go on to edit preferences. And within within the input, you have an option for emulate Numpad. So instead of using the Numpad, you'll you'll be able to use zero to nine keyboard keys to basically do the same thing as if you were to use the Numpad. Now, next up, what if you end up rendering a setup, a scene, and one of the objects is simply missing? Why could that be the case? Well, the most obvious thing would be that if you have to sign this sign, for example, selected, you can go over it by clicking a dot over your outliner. And next to the name, you have a button for render. If this is disabled, you would not be able to see this in the render view. So even with this being visible in our viewport, it's just going to be invisible in a render just like that. So make sure that this is on. And if you're not seeing this button, you can go to the filter tab and just locate the button over here. Once you have it enabled, you should be able to just set it up, like so. Or vice versa, if you don't have anything in the scene in that area and an object randomly pops up and appears, maybe you ended up using height functionality previously, using the button H, and you're just not seeing it in the viewport, you can click AltnH and that will unhide everything in your scene that was hidden previously. Now, what happens if your depth of field is missing? So let's say we have this camera over here and your depth of field is just simply not working. Let me just go ahead and grab this camera. Let's say, your depth of field is just simply not working. Well, first of all, try changing the focus distance to something an extremely minimum value until we get an actual blur. If you're able to see the blur, that's great. If not. I would say try checking firstly if you have the same camera setup. And what I mean by that, maybe the main camera selected is not actually the one that you're looking for. So for example, right now, I have a different camera being active, but I have a selected camera that's not the same that I'm looking at. If I start playing around with the our camera, obviously, nothing is going to happen. So that's the first thing. The next thing is check if you have the local camera turned off on the viewport, because that would also be offsetting what you're seeing in the viewport. And then finally, if you're having issues, I would recommend you to try using focus on object item first just to kind of allow you to get the right item. And once you get the right item, play with F stop. And this should bring you back to the main item that's being rendered. Next up, what happens if you do end up rendering a piece and nothing comes out of it? Well, you might want to check at the render window. If it's not, and you have another item selected, you might not be able to see anything here. So just click on the button next to it and just search for Render, and you should be able to find render result. This will give you the same render output that you see on your camera. Now, if you're still not seeing anything, it might be something to do with the render engine. Recently, Blender has enabled Vulcan into part of its software. And if we go to edit preferences, we can locate that. So if we go on the system, you'll see right now I am using OpenGL since it's a little bit more sturdier at this point. But by default, I believe some of you might have Vulcan enabled. Vulcan, if you enable it, it's great lightweight and often a little bit faster in rendering, I'll be honest. But sometimes it doesn't quite work. It also doesn't always work if you have Vulcan setup with a Cycles render engine. So if you have Cycles render engine with EV render engine. So EV render engine is a real time renderer, so more like a video game type of a render engine. But Cycles is more for tracing, and that's a bit slower, but gives you better results. So if you're using Vulcan and Eve, you might be in trouble. But since we are on this note, I would just highly recommend you honestly use Vulcan and make sure it's set to EV. Then the next thing, if you want higher and faster renders, I would highly recommend you changing the device to be GPU compute. You're not seeing GPU compute in your render properties, you might need to go onto the systems and preferences and locate the Cycles render device. If it's set to none, you won't be able to have this option selected. Make sure to select either Opt x, CUDA or whichever option you have available. If it's set to none, then we won't be able to have That, but with any of these options, you'll be able to select your graphics card to be used for render, which is going to speed up your render output, so much. And within the samplings, make sure to go into it as well. Renderer has a denoiser and Deniser use GPU option. When you have used GPU for denoiser it's going to be faster as well. For preview, shots of compositor, I highly recommend you to use lower MAX samples. Even like 50, 40 would be reasonable for a preview, and then you can up in a notch when you're happy, going up to 1,000 or even more in certain cases if you're going for, like, a four K resolution. That's totally viable. For preview, if you go like 5,200, it's quite a nice result. 200 is a good result for render as well. And as for the noiser, we also have options. So pre filter, if you set it to fast and quality set to balanced, you'll be able to get a much faster output when doing a simple render. But I'm just going to leave these on because for final renders, they're quite nice. Now, if you want even faster render, you have an alternative option. And if you want to keep all the default Mac samples, all the lovely great quality denisers, you can do that. In our viewport, we can have once we have the camera enabled, and we are the camera, we can use Control B and just simply select, let's say, part of the shot. You can see what it does. It basically turns only for that setup. Control B allows you to get basically just a tiny bit of a scene out of your item, out of your viewport, which if you render it, you're only going to be seeing that specific piece. So it's great for preview, it's great for getting a quick cropped piece, as you can see over here because, well, you're not going to render anything else. And as you saw, it's much so much faster. So that was real time render. I wasn't able to even finish speaking and was just finished with render. And if you want to get it back, you can click Control Old B, and that will cancel out that view. A view called render region. Now, if you have some issue with the lighting, the easiest way and the best way of sorting that would be if you have render properties opened up, you can go all the way down until you have color management. Color management will allow you to use some tweaking of the scene for all the cameras overall. So if I was to lower the exposure, we can darken everything, and you can see that everything is now super, super dark, maybe for night scene or something of the sort. But by default, if we had this set as something like free, you can see it actually very, very bright, extremely bright. When you have a day light scene. The default ambient lighting can be a little bit overwhelming for you. So if we want to make sure we get a nicer looking scene, I recommend you to lowering the exposure, which again, will switch up how the rest of the environment is being seen. And it's just a quick and easy way to get some lighting controls for your camera. But just keep in mind that it is a scene setting, so every camera uses the same current exposure. And that's going to be it for me. Thank you so much for watching. I really hope you enjoyed these lessons and you were able to pick something new and interesting along the way to help you in your future projects. Thank you so much for watching and make sure to leave a positive review or just a feedback in general as it really helps us out with our future courses. Thanks again and happy modeling, everyone.