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Since the Maxwell camera is very similar to a real-life DSLR camera, most of the parameters in this group should be intuitive to anyone familiar with traditional photography: shutter speed, f/stop, ISO, exposure mode, diaphragm. The Camera section in the main Maxwell documentation contains a detailed explanation of how these features work.Note:
The region settings allow you to render only a part of the frame. You can also do this by using Maya's region render feature, but sometimes it's more useful to be able to type in the region extents, rather than use the selection rectangle in the Render View. When Maya region rendering is used, it overrides any region settings defined at the camera level. The "Region Mode" attribute has 3 possible values:
- Full: region rendering is off.
- Region: only the specified region is rendered and the rest of the image is black.
- Blowup: the region is scaled to cover the full render resolution. Black bars are added to maintain the aspect ratio, if needed.
The "Custom Bokeh" settings allow you to change the aspect ratio of the bokeh effect, to simulate an anamorphic lens.
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If this group does not appear in your scenes, make sure "Auto Load" is checked for the Maxwell plug-in in the Plug-in Manager. |
Focus
Unlike other render engines, Maxwell always computes depth of field. This effect is influenced by 4 factors: the size of the objects, the focal length, the f/stop and the focus point. It is important to use realistic camera settings and model sizes in order to obtain correct renders.
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If you wish to move the focus to a certain object without altering the camera position, you can select both the camera and the object and click the "Focus to selection" button on the Maxwell shelf (
). If Manual Focus Distance is off on that camera, this will move the aim locator to so that the focus plane contains the pivot of the selected object. If Manual Focus Distance is on, it will leave the aim locator in place and alter the Focus Distance attribute instead.
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You can see how going from f/16 to f/8 makes the image brighter, but also produces a more shallow field (more blur). Leaving the f/stop unchanged by and increasing the exposure to 1/10 seconds produces a brighter image, but also increases the motion blur on the opening lid.
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In this mode Maxwell overrides the shutter time value input by the user with the value computed from the angle (time = angle / 360 * frame time, with frame time = 1 / FPS). It then adjusts the film ISO value so that you get the same exposure as you would with the shutter, f/stop and ISO value values that are specified in the camera parameters. This means that you can set up the exposure and depth of field as you would for a still shot and then control the motion blur independently, without affecting anything else in the render.
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Observe how turning on rotary shutter leaves the exposure and depth of field unchanged and allows you to control the motion trails in isolation. This is in contrast with the shutter priority mode, where changing the motion blur also affected the depth of field, and with the manual mode, where changing the blur also changes changed the image brightness.
The rotary shutter feature is incompatible with the aperture priority mode. If these settings are used in combination, the plug-in will issue a warning at export time and force the exposure mode to shutter priority.
Scripting and Keying the Maxwell Camera Attributes
The plug-in only creates Maxwell camera attributes when they are first set to a non-default value; they do not exist before that. This is done in order to prevent encumbering the scenes with custom attributes, but has the unfortunate side effect that the Attribute Editor controls for them do not behave like regular controls. You cannot right click them to lock the attribute, set keys etc. However, as soon as you change the value of an attribute, it gets created and it also appears under the "Extra Attributes" group, prefixed with "Mx".
The controls in this group behave like regular attribute controls, so you can use them for keying, locking, setting layer overrides etc.
If you want to manipulate these attributes from script, you need to first ensure that they exist. The plug-in provides a function called maxwellSetCustomScalar which creates the attribute if needed and sets it to the specified value, so use that instead of calling setAttr directly:
maxwellSetCustomScalar("double", "cameraShape1", "mxFstop", 8.0);
maxwellSetCustomScalar("long", "cameraShape1", "mxIso", 200);
The first parameter specifies the type of the attribute. Valid values are "long" for integers and enums, "double" for floating point numbers and "bool" for booleans. The following parameters are the node name, attribute name and value. For the complete list of custom attribute names, see the file maxwellCustomAttrs.mel in the scripts/others subdirectory of the Maya installation path.