OTOY Forums

currently a very painful and long winded process when dealing with Ortho views, or views with camera shift - hoping there's a better way?

it's very common with AC to blend an AC line drawing with a colour render (in my case from Octane).

issues:

Ortho - with plan views it's simply impossible to get a true top down Ortho views because you need to be in a perspective view to start Octane. in AC in perspective mode there is no way to get the camera to point directly down so Plan View Ortho is not possible

Even with Side views the process is clunky and even when you get the correct view it's still not possible to exactly match the size between engines (i.e. a wall could be 300 pixels wide in the AC line render, and 400 pixels wide in the Octane colour render.

is there a way for the plugin to work out where the AC AXO camera is and create an Ortho camera to match it exactly?

with camera shift the issue is that Octane and AC manage the shift slightly differently, so again it's not possible to get an exact match. the only workaround i've been able to make use of is to use a level camera and increase the field of view to include everything that needs to be included and then crop at the end. again this is far from ideal.

anyone have better ways to deal with these issues?

is there a way for the plugin to work out where the AC AXO camera is and create an Ortho camera to match it exactly?

I don't think this is possible, sorry, as the AXO camera info that comes from the ArchiCAD SDK to the plugin is not meaningful for the Octane Ortho camera.

Paul

what info does the SDK give?

could we at least have an option to create a true plan view Ortho view. for the reasons given in the OP this is not currently possible and so is a major limitation.

or an option for Top/Front/Back/Left/Right views? that would at least cover standard top down and north/south/east/west elevations...

or maybe it's possible to retrieve Ortho cam rotation values and position from the elevations that are created? the position and orientation of elevations should give you all the info needed to place and rotate an Ortho camera?

Dingbat wrote:what info does the SDK give?

could we at least have an option to create a true plan view Ortho view. for the reasons given in the OP this is not currently possible and so is a major limitation.

or an option for Top/Front/Back/Left/Right views? that would at least cover standard top down and north/south/east/west elevations...

or maybe it's possible to retrieve Ortho cam rotation values and position from the elevations that are created? the position and orientation of elevations should give you all the info needed to place and rotate an Ortho camera?

Someone with better knowledge of ArchiCAD can probably answer these questions better for you. However you can see the information returned from the ArchiCAD SDK at https://archicadapi.graphisoft.com/documentation/api_axonopars?s=axo. It's been years since I've looked at this, but from memory, I found it more useful to not use the ArchiCAD Axo camera, and instead manually enable the Octane Camera->Orthographic pin.

Paul

not sure why i asked for the SDK info as i it doesn't really mean anything to me :/

current workflow is far from ideal. using the Ortho pin is clunky and slow, and more often than not i forget that it's checked and then wonder why my Octane perspective view doesn't match my AC view.

if it's possible to use Elevations to define Octane ortho camera position and rotation around the Y axis (x and z rotation assumed 0 deg) and automatically enable/disable the Ortho pin that would help a lot.

if none of this is possible can we at least have a way to define a true top down view, which is currently not possible and is essential to create standard plan views.

and though not ideal maybe we could have an additional Ortho/Perspective camera switch on the main render tab? finding it in the settings can take a while.

appreciate none of this may be feasible and thanks for taking the time to explain.

another issue with the camera matching - it looks like the AC camera Roll Angle is not matched by the Octane camera

Dingbat wrote:another issue with the camera matching - it looks like the AC camera Roll Angle is not matched by the Octane camera

Yes, this is covered in the Limitations at https://docs.otoy.com/ArchiCADH/ArchiCADPluginManual.htm#ArchiCAD/Limitations.htm

appreciate none of this may be feasible and thanks for taking the time to explain.

The limitations with the Ortho camera are also covered in the Limitations section of the manual. Perhaps some other users could detail how they handle Axonometry cameras.

Thanks

Paul