This article explains you everything about the Daz3d Camera Settings. The camera is an important asset to any scene. You can’t produce a render without a camera. And knowing how to set it up and use properly will improve said renders drastically. To inform you about Daz3D camera settings is exactly why this article was created.
If you prefer watching a video see below, otherwise keep reading.
Usually virtual cameras are similar to the real-world ones. And Daz Studio is not an exception. This means that if you have experience with cameras and their settings in the real world, you already know a lot about them in a virtual setting too. But they are still quite different. Mainly because software cameras don’t need to obey any real-world laws and physics.
Adding Cameras
Obviously, first of all we need to create a camera and place it somewhere. You can add camera to the scene by either finding “New Camera” option in the “Create” menu[1] or by pressing “Create a new camera” button on the panel[2]:
After you try to add a camera using any of the two ways above, you will be greeted by the menu. Here you can change the Name and Label of a camera, so it would be easier to find it amongst others. And if you press the “Show Options >>” button at the bottom, you will see more options:
Default setting will place the camera at the standard view. Same place, where it is situated when you open the new scene. Second option will move the camera to where you view is, but will not copy any viewport settings. Third option will do exactly as the last one, but also will copy all transforms. And last is to place the camera at the selected object. For example, spotlight.
Moving Cameras
So you added the camera to your scene. Now you need to place it, where you would want it. And you have a couple of options to do this.
First one was talked about in the previous section. You can place your viewport where you want the camera to be, and then Daz3D move the camera to perspective view.
Alternatively, you can move your camera as any other object. To clarify, I mean using the transforms under “General” in the “Parameters” menu. Consequently, here you can both move and rotate your camera along any of the three main axis.
Probably the most flexible and convenient way is to change your viewport to the camera view. You need to find the dropdown menu at the top right corner of a viewport. Now choose your Camera in this menu:
Your view will be transported to that of a camera. And now you can use any default means of moving the viewport. Such as Orbiting, Panning and Zooming. After you place the camera where you want it, just change in the same drop-down menu to the Perspective view or any other. Now you have a camera directed at anything you want.
Last way is using the “Frame” button. This button allows you to put a selected object or part of the object directly into the frame of your camera. So it would be centered. To do this, firstly you need to change your view to the camera view, as explained in the previous way. Now just select an object or a part of it, for example head[1], and press the “Frame” button [2]. Now your camera is framed exactly around that part.
Daz3d Camera settings
Each camera has its own settings. These settings can change how you and others see your scene. It can both improve it and make everything much worse. That is why we will go into each one of the available settings and explain them.
You can find the “Cameras” tab with all of the settings commonly on the right hand of the screen, amongst other tabs:
If you don’t think you have it open anywhere, then open it yourself. You can do this by going into “Window” > “Panes(Tabs)” and finding the “Cameras” there.
General
At the top of the menu we have “General”. It is really similar to the “General” from the “Parameters” tab. You also can move, rotate and scale here. Moving and rotating are self-explanatory. But I don’t recommend using the scale option at all. You can change how your scene looks, stretch it or squeeze. But there are better ways to achieve these results later.
The one important function here is the “Point At” at the bottom. You can use it to point your camera at anything on your scene you want. The only problem is that it is pointing to the origin point of said object. And sometimes the origin point can be placed not where you would expect it. For example this is what happens, when you try to point at the character:
It pointed at the bottom of the scene. Definitely not what we have expected. But you can avoid this problem by choosing to point at the specific part of a figure, for example at the head or hand. This way, it will work correctly.
Display
This menu offers mainly to change how the camera and everything about it will look in the viewport.
First options just change whether you can see and select the camera. You also can change this in the “Scene” tab.
“Display Persistence” will make cameras’ view wireframe always visible. Usually it is only visible when you have the camera selected. And settings after that are for customizing this wireframe. You can change the opacity, color and scale. These settings in action:
Everything else in this menu is for changing how depth of field overlay looks in the viewport and customizing it in a similar way to the camera wireframe. About the depth of the field itself is in the next section.
Camera
The very first setting here – “Perspective” is quite interesting. You see, people see everything a bit distorted. To clarify, the further object is from your eyes – smaller it will look. Even gigantic objects can be seen as small if you are far enough. This kind of view is called Perspective view.
Above you can see how our scene looks in the perspective view. Cylinder looks like it is quite small compared to the man. This is because the cylinder is situated further from the camera than character. Also pay attention to the grid. Squares closer to the camera are much bigger, than further ones.
Opposite to the Perspective is Orthographic view. This view projects every object in the way, so it does not matter how far it is from the camera, you will always see the real size. Here is absolutely same scene, but in the Orthographic view:
You can clearly see that the cylinder is much bigger than it was in perspective view. That is because it is that big. Also notice that all the squares from the grid become identical. This view is very useful for making some precise stuff and for isometric renders.
Also in the “Camera” tab you can change the Frame Width and Focal Length. This is what I was talking about, when said that there are better options for changing size of your camera view than changing camera size itself.
And last settings here are dedicated to the depth of field, also known as DOF. This function will help you to create the blur effect on the objects that are out of focus. Like this:
It is an important and a little more difficult option. So you can learn how to use this function to a maximum in our separate article about Daz3D depth of field.
Lens Daz3d Camera Settings
Lens tab is a bit more advanced and relies on the real-life camera properties.
The “Lens Thickness”. Frankly, I am not even sure if it works. In real life this would cause the centre to be brighter than the edges. Causing a vignette effect. I could not recreate this effect in the Daz Studio.
“Lens Radial Bias” works together with the Depth Of Field and Blades functions. About Blades you can read in the next section. If you have DOF turned on, changing the Lens Radial Bias also changes how blurry background comes. Using it you can make a bokeh effect. This renders has only Lens Radia Bias changed to much lower from the previous one:
Lens Shift is on an advanced side. As it relies heavily on real-life camera properties. It is used to change the perspective. And is different from just moving the camera itself. I would recommend you to read about it more on the internet, if you want to figure it out.
Really interesting option – “Lens Distortion type”. It, as it says, adds distortion to the view. You can distort your renders in a lot different ways, creating unusual images. Maybe you want to create a fisheye effect? Yes, this is how to do it. Every setting after this controls the distortions itself. Their scale and strength.
Spherical lens distortion type
Blades
Not a big selection of options. And also not a big difference they make too. But still can be used for improving your renders.
They work only with the DOF turned on, so don’t forget to do that. You saw that I have two light sources behind the man on my renders. And when I lowered the Lens Radial Bias – they changed by turning into a donut shape. That is because by default Aperture Blades set to 0. You can change how lights look by changing the Aperture Blades. To what you set it – that would be the amount of edges that you see. For example, here I set it to the 3, so i have triangular shapes:
And “Aperture Blade Rotation” is for rotating the apertures that you receive in render.
Dimension
This can be a useful tab. At the first glance you can only set the “Use Local Dimensions” to ON here, but when you turn it on, more options appear:
Now you can set the dimensions that you might want for this camera specifically. So if you don’t want to change the dimension for the whole scene – this is perfect. This will not influence your “Render settings” in any way. We have an article about render settings in Daz Studio and everything you might want to know about it too.
Headlamp
Headlamp is a light that’s pointed from your camera. Here you can turn in on and off, change its intensity and offset it.
This function can be useful, if you don’t have any other source of light in the scene. But it is always better to turn it off. As its light is very plain and flat and will absolutely make your render worse. There are a lot of better lights that you can use. And even built-in HDRI that can always provide you with the lighting if you have none. You can learn more about lighting, how to properly use it and set up in our Daz3d Iray Lighting Tutorial.
Point of View Daz3d Camera Settings
You might want to create a scene, where you look from the perspective of one of your characters. Technique that is called either a Point of View or First Person view. I will show you how to set up the Daz Studio POV camera yourself.
First of all you will need to place the camera right on top of one of the eyes. You need to do this manually. Remember to use Front, Top and side views. They will help you a lot. Match the blue line from camera, so it would go right out of the pupil, like here:
After you placed the camera right on one of the eyes, you will need to parent them. To do this, find the camera in the “Scene” menu. Then right click on it and select “Change “Camera” Parent”.
In the menu, that appears after clicking that, find the eye that you placed the camera on top of. In my case it is the left eye. And that’s it, now you have the Point of view camera. If you would transform your character in any way – camera will follow. Here is the result of my render:
Camera Animation
Also you can animate your camera. You can change any parameters and make transforms. Then create keyframes and voila, animation is ready.
You can use cameras to create fly-throughs of your scene, make your characters follow cameras and vice-versa. Or create rotating camera animations around your subjects to show every aspect and detail.
If you would like to know more about animating cameras, how to make daz studio eyes pointed at cameras, or 360 cameras – you can read our Daz Studio Animation tutorial. It covers all kinds of animation, not only cameras.
Conclusion Daz3d Camera Settings
I hope that this article could answer all common questions like how in Daz3D move camera to perspective view or how to set up camera in Daz Studio. Remember, that your Daz3D camera settings is something that can make your render stand out. If you use everything properly, you can make something unique out of the common scene. Just keep testing trying things out.