Need to see more left and right with camera staying the same

[heni30]

Hi,

 

I have a rendering of the exterior of a retail space. My client came back saying he needed to see more left and right but nothing else can change in the rendering.

 

The camera has to stay where it is and I cannot change the camera angle either. How can I tell the renderer to show me more of the sides without changing anything having to do with the camera?

 

Thanks.

[Boris Horosavin]

Hm... theoretically, you could increase width resolution in Render settings and then just move your camera back away, not changing the axis or lens or anything. In fact, I don't know if there is any easier way to solve this. It would be a bit tricky to find the right camera position but maybe you could use your existing render pic as your viewport background to guide and help you finding right spot.

[heni30]

Hi, thanks for your suggestion. If you experiment with moving the camera back and forth you will see angles flatten as you move away and become more extreme as you get closer. So I think it would have to be a matter of moving back (flattening effect) and changing the lens to a smaller angle which would compensate for the flattening and just doing it by trial and error until it fits. The reason I don't want to change the camera is because i have a lot of merchandise placed in photoshop which would have to be re-positioned if the existing image changes. There used to be an option in rendering called "box selected" I believe that would render to the limits of an selected object. So if you had an object bigger that your scene it would render to it's size regardless of what the camera limits were.

Edited April 22, 2012 by heni30

[Boris Horosavin]

I suppose the main problem is the fact that the effect you need would be physically and optically incorrect. Therefore you would need some kind of tool to bypass this rules, like plane clipping or vertical shift modifier. But I simply don't know for such command or script, if it even exists.

[LukeC]

Hi George,

 

There is a really useful script called overscan that will do the trick for you. Alternatively if you are using VRay cameras, you can use the vertical and horizontal offsets in the cameras properties, however this is only useful for one side at a time, so I'd say overscan is your best bet.

[Umesh Raut]

I may be wrong and/or may not have understood your situation correctly, but can you not change only the lens for a wider angle shot and then trim the upper and lower unwanted parts? Or may be pan the camera, take two shots and combine them in image editing software?

[Ernest Burden III]

change only the lens for a wider angle shot and then trim the upper and lower unwanted parts...

 

Exactly. Wider angle, trim in Photoshop. I will add that if there is a re-render timing issue, you can place a matte over most of the part you've already rendered and it'll go faster. A matte meaning a polygon placed near the camera to mask most of part you don't need, with a material that has no channels active except being opaque, and with all GI and such off, too.

[erickdt]

Couldn't you just re-render with the width of your output wider (without constriaing your current aspect ratio)?

 

E

[heni30]

Thanks for your suggestions.

 

1. Wider Lens. This would do the job. I would get more left and right which I could splice the new sides into the original. In reality things start getting stretched out at the sides but that could be compensated for in PS.

 

2. Shoot a little left and a little right - compensate for slight convergence in PS. Would also work.

 

3. Overscan script - will try and keep you posted!

 

4. Wider output with no aspect ratio constraint - It seems like this only works with height - not width. The width will stay the same

no matter what values you have and the height will vary accordingly.

 

5. Moving the camera back a little with tweaks in PS would work as well.

 

Is there any way to achieve what "box selected" used to do before 2009? Basically I would have put a box that was 5 feet beyond the limits of the camera view left and right; make it not visible to the camera; select it; choose " box selected " and the scene would render to the width and height limits of the selected box - completely ignoring the camera limits.

 

Thanks!

Edited April 23, 2012 by heni30

[heni30]

The Overscan script works perfectly without a hitch. You just tell it how much wider you want the image in pixels and it renders the extra portions left and right. The ONLY thing I noticed is that the extended image comes out a little bit lighter overall. I'll have to email the author and see what that's about.

[Nic H]

+ 1000 overscan

other options are not worth trying