When you look at your scene in Maya, you are looking through a camera. Think of it as being a director on a movie set and looking through a camera lens. Your field of view is restricted to what you can see through that lens.
By default, Maya has four cameras that let you view your scene in a panel: the perspective camera and the three orthographic cameras (side, top, front) that correspond to the default scene views. You look through these cameras (panels) as you model, animate, shade, and texture objects. To switch among these cameras, open the Panels menu and select a camera from the Perspective or Orthographic submenu.
Create and adjust a camera
Select Create > Cameras > Camera to create a basic camera. You may want to create other types of cameras for more complex animations, or a stereoscopic camera for three dimensional renders. See Maya camera types for more information.
After creating a camera, you can do the following:
- Navigate with your camera using a variety of tools such as tumble, dolly, and 2d pan/zoom (see Camera Tools). See Navigate with the camera for a video demonstration.
- Frame the scene with a camera.
- Adjust the camera and its attributes via the
Camera Attribute Editor. Follow
these basic tips to ensure a realistic camera.
Note: You can also set camera attributes when creating a camera (see Create Camera Options).
- If you have multiple cameras, select the camera through which you are viewing the scene. See Look through a camera.
- Display view guides or boundaries that represent the rendering border, camera aperture, and so forth. See Display film gate, resolution gate, and other view guides.
- Enable and adjust depth of field so that some objects in the scene are sharply focused while others are blurred or out of focus, based on their distance from the camera. See Adjust depth of field and Depth of Field in the Camera Attribute Editor.
Viewing cameras vs. rendering cameras
By default, your scene has only one renderable camera (the original perspective camera) that can render all objects in your scene.
If you have more than one camera in your scene, you can make the additional camera(s) renderable by adding them to the Renderable Cameras section of the Render Settings window. See Make an existing camera renderable.