Why is it so hard to match the camera projection angle?
polycounter lvl 14
I've never really tried to match the perspective of an image before, and I've barely tinkered with the Camera Attributes in Maya, so I have a few questions about doing so.
First off, why is this so difficult? Forgive my outright ignorance, but seriously, from a non-technical viewpoint, what gives? I see the vanishing point over on the left there, but I take that to mean that I have make sure my vertical edges stay vertical and that my horizontal edges move into the vanishing point. However, it doesn't seem like my cube there is, well, vanishing fast enough. Is this a camera placement problem or a Camera Attribute problem? If it's the latter, what should I be looking at tweaking?
First off, why is this so difficult? Forgive my outright ignorance, but seriously, from a non-technical viewpoint, what gives? I see the vanishing point over on the left there, but I take that to mean that I have make sure my vertical edges stay vertical and that my horizontal edges move into the vanishing point. However, it doesn't seem like my cube there is, well, vanishing fast enough. Is this a camera placement problem or a Camera Attribute problem? If it's the latter, what should I be looking at tweaking?
Replies
Knowing the cameras focal length for the shot you are working with helps. This should be possible to get even after shooting in the EXIF info in your image. Not sure how RAW format stores this but should also contain this info. Also called EXIF with RAW?
I didn't think Live really worked with still images. Have you used it to do this?
If it doesn't, you could... I guess download the trial of max, run it through CameraMatch, then export the camera through FBX to Maya? Although camera match doesn't work if the image has been cropped. I've had some pretty good success with getting a camera that's close with illustrations. It doesn't really work with drawn concepts that well but for something like this it might spit something useful out.
You can also check out sketch-up it has some pretty good camera matching tools.
[ame]
Unfortunately I don't have Maya Live =/
As far as messing with the camera's focal length, it seemed to only zoom in and out the scene.
EDIT: Got it =]
http://www.cgbootcamp.com/tutorials/2009/10/30/match-3d-geometry-to-a-photograph.html