interior scene - camera outdoors

[wannabeartist]

Hi all,

 

I'm working on an interior scene and I would like to bring the camera outside in order to work with a little more sensible focal lengths.

 

I'm a little puzzled in just how to do this correctly

 

If I use clipping planes, will that affect my lighting? Photons? FG?

 

Are there any other methods? My walls are shelled (boxes) so the Mentral ray's backface culling method wont work - not out of the box anyway.

 

Thanks!

[abmitalia]

Never tried it out - but make the backface culling method work by eliminating the inner polygon where you want to photographate through - just a thought - may be a professional hit's m of the chair for that. RK

[wannabeartist]

Yes, that's an option, but I wouldn't want to modify the model unless absolutely necessary.

 

In the mean while, I did some tests with clipping planes. They don't seem to mess with photons at least - if someone knows better, please correct me

 

Here's a little test scene and renders with clipping planes set before the lights and in front of the lights - the hot spots in the back wall are reflections.

[RevitGary]

I believe you can make your photon map without the clipping plane, save the file and reuse that map when you use the clipping plane Just to make sure you have the correct photon map.

[wannabeartist]

Right, that's good to remember.

 

Overall this clipping plane technique seems to work pretty well. The only problem is with walk troughs and other animations, then it gets a little difficult when you have to animate the clipping planes too. I guess the backface culling is a better choice for animations.

[Peter M. Gruhn]

The near wall was detached from the box. All were shelled. The near wall set to not visible to camera. Tested w/ radiosity, light tracer, mental gi, mental fg, mental fg&gi. All gave first glance conceptually correct answers. The light is an mrAreaOmni at defaults. Exposure probably changes as I changed presets. I think I turned it off first thing as a debuggin tool.

 

One thing nice about detach then shell is that you get a capped "cut".

 

If you try the baking route, and have to make an animation, I once did a tiny test with an object (sphere?) linked to the camera as a fake clipping volume and a volume select and delete mesh on the wall objects. Without looking, that probably works best with either a well subdivided mesh or crossing rather than window selection on faces (if volume select so supports).

 

If you have to go with some sort of volume select and delete option but your camera moves around too much, maybe the thing to do is anchor the volume in the model and have it rotate to follow the camera. Or maybe a spline with animated end verts and renderable turned on FAT.

[wannabeartist]

Thanks for posting the test and the tips!

 

I got away without actually doing the animation this time, but it's definitely something to learn for future projects. I'm still pretty green on using clipping planes smartly, so I'd better do some test projects.