YOU RUINED MY LIFE (for about a week) I SPENT SO LONG TRYING TO FIGURE THIS OUT ON MY OWN THAT I SEE LENSMAKING EQUATIONS IN MY SLEEP thanks for the files now my addiction is reawakened and now the rest of summer break is going to be indoors
The biggest proof of all that you're a mad scientist is that you only charged 5 dollars for this. I was legit expecting a price of 50 bucks at the VERY least.
I can't believe I will be able to play around with this. Your video was incredible, not only for what you achieved to do in blender, but also the editing. And now you optimized and made it more user friendly! Bravo
Of course, more interesting than this base effort is if someone wrote this kind of compensation within the renderer, but this will do perfectly for now.
This is so awesome. You're starting a whole new generation of 3D Rendering. Thank you so much for making us a part of it. I know how hard you worked to make it happen.
I love using the camera but just wish that there was a version with a wider fov, its so narrow at the moment that you can only capture small scenes or you have to move really far away with the camera wich makes the scene look a bit flat
It's a terrific work, congrats! I have two questions: - how do you get the correct aperture? Do you approximate a Sunny16 calculation with the scene and check roughly how the blades on the camera are open/closed? - does the setup works also with Blender 3.5? (I started the render process but I had to stop it because I needed the PC, I'll try again later, but I would like to know if there's something that will mess up the result in that Blender version) Thanks!
Thanks! For the aperture it's approximate, I didn't attach any actual numbers to it so it's "guess and check" to see what looks good. The viewfinder camera approximates the aperture darkening effect. As for the blender version, it should still work in 3.5 but if you run into issues, try 3.6
I can't seem to properly get the subject in focus, any tips on that? When rotating the focus wheel, there is a black line with a cross in front of it. Is that the focus plane? Is the tip of the line the focus or the cross?
The center of the focus empty should roughly be the focus point. You might need a little bit of trial and error. Send me an email if you continue having issues!
@@sirrandalot Thanks! After experimenting for a while it seems that the utmost tip of the focus empty is the sharpest! Another question, I'll write it here instead of E-Mail just to be quick: When rendering with F12, three separate layers are rendered. One red, one green and one blue. Is there a difference in rendering these three in comparison to just rendering the ViewLayer? I compared both and the RGB layer render is very noisy compared to the ViewLayer?
@@SeGin_ depends on the distance, the calculation isn't perfect. In order to get the proper effects of the colour filters and halation, you need to render the 3 layer way, otherwise you're missing out on all those film effects and only getting the lens distortion. Still works but not really the complete style package.
wow! just wow! question. Is there some wiki of forum where we can chat about this? Like for instance how to improve render times or how to avoid fireflies?
I got an error on Blender 3.62 on MAC OS : Python: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/Users/xxx/xxxx/xxxx/RenderPhoto.py", line 49, in KeyError: 'bpy_prop_collection[key]: key "DummyLayer" not found'
Did you copy the camera into another file? The scene setup is important, as mentioned in the readme, so it's better to import your subject into a copy of the virtual camera file. If you followed the readme instructions then there may be a bug. Let me know, thanks!
I still can't believe the "unnecessarily " complicated render video only has like 500k views. It really blew my mind and now I can freaking download the file!? Thank u so much!!!
Before clicking the link in the description, I randomly guessed around 20-30 dollars for access to such a project just based on the amount of work and knowledge required to make this happen. I think you underestimate what this can be worth to people...
I'm a bit stuck at the moment. Trying to figure out how to render with a different size from the standard 3000px x 2000px. Any advice? Great product so glad I bought it!
And to think, some time back in the past, you probably opened up Blender, saw the default cube and thought, "what the hell do I do with this?.. it doesn't make any sense at all, I'm confused...".
I WOULD LOVE a video made for the people that are not used to 3D design but would love to play around with the camera, people like regular designers, photographers and the rest of us peasants :D
I have one final improvement suggestion - remove the renderer camera and just use the texture baking option since it reduces losses for another order (didn't try it actually but the hypothesis needs to be tested) and also helps to win an extra light bounce, so bounce count can be reduced 1 step down for extra speed.
question. obviously, different wavelengths of light refract differently even if you have the same two mediums. did you use something like the sellmeier equation, cauchy equation, or the drude-lorentz model to calculate the different "indexes of refraction" for the glass given specific wavelengths? or did you just eyeball it increase/decrease the indexes of refraction arbitrarily? i am going insane. thanks.
I eyeballed it since it wasn't going to be precise anyways. Cycles isn't a spectral renderer so the colour/wavelength translation is an approximation to start off with..
Wow, nice bro! I see a lot of people posting your video on photography discord servers, theres definitely some people that would want to get their hands on this.
I wonder if it's possible to speed it up even more. I bought the file and played a bit with it - I tested a different method - instead of looking at a glossy reflection I turned the image plane into a transmission material and placed the camera on the other side - looking at the back end of the plane. I also had to set the color value of the transmission shader to 25 because the resulting image was too dark. This method renders the same sample count 3 times faster but it is more noisy than your method. However the transmission plane isn't using any fancy normals (in fact it's barely affected by them, but you'd probably have more luck in modifying your setup than I do). Maybe it would be possible to combine these two methods to achieve much faster rendering. I also tried making the plane into a glass shader with high roughness and it worked similarly to the transmission shader except it was actually visibly affected by the normals - the issue of modifying the normal setup to work with this approach still remains tho.
Thanks for checking it out! Yeah as of yet, the "fancy normals" method is the fastest I found which still retains the physically accurate nature of the raycasting and doesn't sacrifice any of the cool lens effects (which is the whole point of the project lol), because of how the material is made. I have no doubt there are improvements to be made somewhere though!
I guess you could. The importing your scene into the camera file would be the difficult part, I'd start my animation from scratch inside the file... what he could do, and certainly I'd pay for it also, is an addon that brings this virtual camera and the whole composition and render script into any blender project.
@@NameWasntTaken Will likely screw it up, not sure about massively though. I'm guessing it'll mess with the intensities rather than the actual form of the image.
@@sirrandalot I clamped indirects just a tiny bit, I had a dark render and stray RGB pixels were appearing in the shadows, incongruous to any light source. From A/B testing it doesn't appear to affect the rest of the image in any way (or if it did, it's basically unnoticeable). Similar artifacts were showing up in just a standard camera render too so I think it's a cycles thing rather than the virtual camera. Fixing that, your camera has made my renders look incredible - the grainy effect looks so much better than when I try to apply it in post in Photoshop! Bravo sir
Heyas! I've been playing around with the camera for a few days now trying to re-render some old renders to see how they look. I keep getting an issue though where the scale of the camera to the scale of the other models is completely out of whack due to how I made those old scenes. I tried just simply pulling the camera back but even adjusting the focus ring to as far as it can go causes things to still be really out of focus on some renders. I was wondering if there was a way to adjust the camera to focus further away and/or if there was a way to just simply scale the whole camera up without causing problems?
It's difficult to scale the camera due to how all the calculations and drivers work. Best bet would be to scale the scene you're trying to render if that's possible. The closest the camera can focus is about 1m, and the farthest is 32m which is effectively infinite because of how inaccurate the lens focusing is.
Fair enough! The scenes I have been working with have things like hair and other constraints that don't scale well which is why I was asking. But thank you!@@sirrandalot
Of course! No need to be sorry, I've been having a blast with it. It's been fun.I just thought I'd ask before I go trying to tinker with things. You did a good job! @@sirrandalot
The updated screen material uses a perfectly glossy shader, but then modifies the normal texture to randomly reflect rays within only a certain range. If you pause on my crappy paint diagram you'll see that I drew it out (as best I could with a mouse on ms paint). This effectively gets rid of any "lost rays" that would have originally just bounced into the inside walls of the camera box, which was actually the majority of the rays.
I had been hoping you would do this. Actually, have you tried splitting the projection plane into its individual R, G and B layers to try and mimic physically accurate halation?
This is really cool! Done some interesting experiments myself. Including making functional newtonian based telescopes that includes functional barlow and eyepieces. Very interesting what blender is capable of.
