Camera Object

Every scene needs at least one camera object. Without a camera object you can see only a grey background in the 3D view. It is possible to put as many cameras as you want into the scene but only one camera can be active at once. The active camera is the camera through which you look.

The icon of the active camera will be highlighted in the object browser, so that you can easily recognize which camera is currently active. The active camera is the camera through which you look through when you choose "Scene camera" in the tool bar of the 3D view.

Properties

  • field of view: Field of view of the camera. The bigger the field of view, the more of the scene you can see.
  • clip near: The distance to the near clipping plane. Every primitive which is in front of the near clipping plane will be removed by OpenGL.
  • clip far: The distance to the far clipping plane. Every primitive which is behind the far clipping plane will be removed by OpenGL.
  • make active camera: Press this button if you want to make the currently selected camera the active one. After clicking this button the icon of the selected camera should be highlighted. You can also make the camera the active camera by double clicking onto the object icon in the object browser.
  • anti-aliasing mode: There exist two modes. The edge and the color mode. The edge mode only anti-aliases edges while the color mode also anti-aliases procedural materials and textures. In general the edge mode is sufficient and considerably faster.
  • min. samples: Defines the min. samples which will be calculated per pixel. 1x1 results in no anti-aliasing, whilst 16x16 gives very smooth results, but will take much longer to compute. An min. sampling rate of 1x1 should be enough for most scenes. To improve image quality it is better in increase the max. samples rate because it anti-aliases adaptively only those pixels where more samples are needed which is much faster.
  • max. samples: Defines the max. samples per pixel. The renderer will use up to max. samples to improves those areas of the image were a refinement is needed. See also the tolerance parameter. If you need a higher image quality increase this parameter. For most scenes 4x4 should be sufficient.
  • tolerance: Cheetah3D offers adaptive anti-aliasing. This mean that only those pixels are oversampled which actually needs it, for example the edges of a object. With the tolerance property the sensitivity of the adaptive anti-aliasing algorithm can be adjusted. The lower the value the exacter will be the results. Normally a value of 0.05 should be OK. If you set the tolerance to zero no adaptive anti-aliasing will happen and normal full oversampling will be used.
  • camera light: Every active camera has it's own camera light. That is the reason why even a scene without a light source is illuminated. Disable this property if you don't need the camera light anymore. For example when you've set up you own light sources manually.
  • filter size: The width of the filter kernel in pixels.
  • shadows: Use this property to turn on/off the shadow calculation for all light sources.
  • resolution width: Currently only used in the exporter to the .rib file format, and for the renderer. Use it to set the width of the image to be rendered.
  • resolution height: Currently only used in the exporter to the .rib file format, and for the renderer. Use it to set the height of the image to be rendered.
  • background color: Background color for the preview and rendering facilities. Setting this to a transparent colour will result in an image with a properly rendered alpha channel.

© 2001-2010 Martin Wengenmayer. All rights reserved.