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Cameras - Arnold for Cinema4d

Further Reading
See also Cameras in the Arnold User Guide

Native perspective and orthographic (Left, Right, Front, Back, Top, Bottom projection) Cinema 4D cameras are supported by C4DtoA. The supported settings of a Camera object are:

  • Focal Length
  • F-Stop
  • Field of View
  • Film Offset
  • Focus Distance / Focus Object
  • Near / Far Clipping

To adjust the settings for an Arnold camera node, you need to add an Arnold Tag to the camera object. To do this, you have to right-click the Camera and select C4DtoA Tags > Arnold Parameters:

Arnold Camera Types

You can define custom Arnold camera types via the Arnold tag of a Camera object. Enable Custom type and select the Camera type on the Camera tab of the tag. In this case, the native C4D Camera Projection type will not be used.

Arnold provides the following built-in camera types:

The perspective or standard camera is the most common. Both the perspective and fish-eye cameras provide a depth of field and model the effect of altering the camera aperture. The orthographic, cylindrical, and spherical camera types enable certain non-perspective views to be created but do not attempt to model any real-world lens effects (they are normally used for creating environment maps).

Note:

A video tutorial about Rolling Shutter can be found here.

Note:

Focus distance of depth of field effect has to be set on the native Cinema 4D camera (Object tab).

Aperture Mode

Aperture mode in fisheye and perspective cameras select how camera aperture size is calculated:

  • size: Specify aperture size in length unit (e.g. cm).
  • f-stop: Specify f-number and calculate aperture size based on the focal length of the Cinema 4D camera.
  • C4D camera: Calculate aperture size from the f-number and focal length of the Cinema 4D camera.

Third-party Cameras

Developers can extend Arnold with custom camera implementations. To install a third-party camera, you must point the ARNOLD_PLUGIN_PATH environment variable to the folder where the camera plugin binary is located, or just simply copy the binary to the C4DtoA/shaders folder. The camera can then be selected in the Arnold tag (see above) like any other builtin cameras.

Stereo Camera

The native Stereoscopic camera effect is supported by C4DtoA, however Arnold drivers do not support writing anaglyph images. They can only output the image from the left and right camera. To specify the path in an Arnold driver you can use the following tokens:

  • $STEREO: Resolves to 'left' or 'right'  depending on which camera is rendered.
  • $STREAM: Resolves to 'Stream Left' or 'Stream Right' depending on which camera is rendered. This token can be used to mimic the native Save path, for instance /my/output/folder/$STREAM_myimage.exr or /my/output/folder/$STREAM/myimage.exr

If no token is defined in the path, the 'left' or 'right' postfix is added to the file name (e.g. myimage_left.exr).

IPR

The IPR displays the red-cyan anaglyph image when the Stereoscopic effect is enabled.

Note:

Only the red-cyan anaglyph image is supported in the IPR, the different modes and anaglyph settings of the Stereoscopic effect from the render settings are not supported.

The anaglyph, left or right camera can be selected as the active camera in the IPR window.

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