Cameras Icon Scaling - (SOLVED)

vukiol

Is there a way to reduce the size, or way better getting a scaling icon like the moving tool (which is a cool feature)?

I mean, sometimes when turning around a focused object i need to fight with huge icons that prevent me to select objects/subobjects in the scene, because the camera icon is subjected to the perspective, and sometimes, by zooming, you dont see the icon at all but it still to select the camera.

I know its not that big issue, you can hide the cameras or make it unselectable and maybe i am not considering other worst problems with a scaling icon.

Spacious

You can deffinitely scale the camera, and it's outlined avatar in the preview will change to whatever size you want.  just select it and in the properties pane it's got all the same stuff to adjust as any other unrigged item.  Not sure if that will effect how the camera functions as I've never done it, but I've noticed that scale has a tendancy to effect everything in DAZ and in fun, strange ways for some items.  Does that help?  Or am I misunderstanding what you mean?

vukiol

No, thats exactly what i mean, and true, sometimes, you get funny strange effects with "wrong" settings, in fact i have a series of renders that i called "wrong clicks", also something thats not always easy to reproduce :).

Back to the camera affair, good suggestion, it was under my eyes but didnt realized.

Tested and also in this case something strange happened,

basically you can scale the camera to 25% or 1/4

but then you need to proportionally scale up the Focal distance, in this case 400% or 4/1

About the DOF, i am not sure, it looks it gets an inverse scaling, like the F/stop is set to 88, and you get a larger depth of field.

Im rendering right now and it looks you get a more smooth DOF, at 1000 iteration looks really good, but i didnt anyway compared to a normal camera, will make more tests and post the images.

Edit:

Definately, focal distance proportionally, f/stop proportionally inverse

Less convinced about a better dof :)

Taoz

I use to hide the cameras by clicking their eye icon on the Scene tab.  Doesn't seem to affect their functionality in any way.  You can also make the cameras unselectable so they don't get selected if they're in front of something you want to select.  

Spacious

There are definitely a bunch of interesting things that happen when you scale things way outside of their expected ranges.  As an example, when I'm trying to get something to dforce in a very specific way sometimes I'll halve or double the size of a figure with it's clothes and hair and see what happens then. It gets really interesting when I've scaled things by multiples of ten.  I hadn't tested what effects scaling cameras would have, so thanks for testing it out.  I suspected depth of field was going to scale in proportion to physical size, and not much else.  I imagine any lens distortions you've got set up might also get a bit wonky.

One thing I've always really enjoyed about DAZ and especially the dforce and the iray engine is that essentially everything is modeled on the real world.  There are some real world rules or phenomenon that are overlooked and certainly a few rounding errors in the calculations, but overall I've found that approaching tasks exactly the way I would in the real world is often a really good starting place.

I've done a lot of experimentation with resizing, and setting various other things way outside their normal parameters.  In fact if I hadn't discovered the "turn off limits" settings on pretty much every single slider on the first day I used DAZ, I may have never even gotten into this.  I spent years worth of free time just morphing things into ridiculous shapes and laughing.  A Genesis 1 looks pretty goofy when you turn her inside out by a factor of 1000 and try to use the smoothing modifier to make her look like an alien.

vukiol

Taoz said:

I use to hide the cameras by clicking their eye icon on the Scene tab.  Doesn't seem to affect their functionality in any way.  You can also make the cameras unselectable so they don't get selected if they're in front of something you want to select.  

ofc, in fact is not that big problem, my thought was to avoid some clicks, expecially for those who want to manage comics, quick small renders and a lot of pose changes and point of view. In complex and more sofisticad scenes you focus on a single point of view with 1 camera.

but in comics sometimes i really have 20 cameras around, because i prefer to keep good frames without have to save tons of cameras presets, so try to select eyes or small bones becomes a nightmare 

ps interesting tools on your page, i will give a look :)

vukiol

Spacious said:

I imagine any lens distortions you've got set up might also get a bit wonky.

OFC!! Something more to play on!  Another good advice :D

Taoz

vukiol said:

Taoz said:

I use to hide the cameras by clicking their eye icon on the Scene tab.  Doesn't seem to affect their functionality in any way.  You can also make the cameras unselectable so they don't get selected if they're in front of something you want to select.  

ofc, in fact is not that big problem, my thought was to avoid some clicks, expecially for those who want to manage comics, quick small renders and a lot of pose changes and point of view. In complex and more sofisticad scenes you focus on a single point of view with 1 camera.

but in comics sometimes i really have 20 cameras around, because i prefer to keep good frames without have to save tons of cameras presets, so try to select eyes or small bones becomes a nightmare 

ps interesting tools on your page, i will give a look :)

Thanks, some of the DAZ tools are currently broken because of the store changes, but I'm working on updates.   The site is a mess also, I'm working on a new and better one. :)

vukiol

Conclusions:

Tested a bit the lens distortions which dont seems to give interesting results, Also XYZ single scales which gives obviously distortions, nothing that strange.

Apparently, with your suggestions, i found the quickest workaround by scaling the bully camera (also you can do it directly in viewport with a transform tool) at occurrency and re-set to 100 after, its quite quickly because you just have to move the cursor from viewport to parameter tab, without going to the scene tab and search the camera, and camera settings remains inalterate.

great success! :)