newbie Question - Camera Position Units

[kaublezw]

Hi There - First, I'm a total newbie interested primarily in creating Digital stills for the Gear VR.

Anyway, I exported a simple box geometry from 3DS max as an OBJ. The dimensions are 20 meters by 20 meters by 4 meters. My OctaneRender OBJ import units are set to meters.

I created a camera in OctaneRender with the following setup(I assumed units are meters): Position: 0, 2, 0. Target: 0, 2, 1, Up Vector: 0, 1, 0. I expect this setting to position a camera mid-way between the floor and the ceiling, but it's not. It's practically on the floor. And to get to the ceiling I have to specify a positional Y value of about 156. The orientation of the camera is exactly as I expect it. The height is not.

What am I doing wrong? Why do the camera units appear not to be in meters? If not meters, then what are the units? Version of Octane is 2.24.1

Thanks,
Zach

[stratified]

Hi There - First, I'm a total newbie interested primarily in creating Digital stills for the Gear VR.

Anyway, I exported a simple box geometry from 3DS max as an OBJ. The dimensions are 20 meters by 20 meters by 4 meters. My OctaneRender OBJ import units are set to meters.

I created a camera in OctaneRender with the following setup(I assumed units are meters): Position: 0, 2, 0. Target: 0, 2, 1, Up Vector: 0, 1, 0. I expect this setting to position a camera mid-way between the floor and the ceiling, but it's not. It's practically on the floor. And to get to the ceiling I have to specify a positional Y value of about 156. The orientation of the camera is exactly as I expect it. The height is not.

What am I doing wrong? Why do the camera units appear not to be in meters? If not meters, then what are the units? Version of Octane is 2.24.1

Thanks,
Zach

Camera units should be the same as the scene units - it's easier for us to help if you post a screenshot or just package the scene and post it on the forum.

cheers,
Thomas

[kaublezw]

Attached is the scene package.

[stratified]

The dimensions of your room are roughly 787 x 160 x 787 (W X H X D). You exported your scene incorrectly to OBJ have a look at the export settings in 3DS max.

cheers,
Thomas

[kaublezw]

Thanks. How did you figure out the dimensions of my scene? My units in 3DS Max are in meters and the export scale is set to 1, so I'm not sure what's going on. But at least I know where to look.

A different question I have...is there a way to assign different materials to different objects layers that are in the same OBJ file? For a scene with multiple objects, it's cumbersome to export different OBJ files per material.

Thanks,
Zach

[stratified]

By using the orthographic camera. The width of the image equals the scale of view so I placed the sides of your rectangle exactly between the edges of the image and read the scale of view value.

Another way is peeking in the obj file. You will see that those vertices are nowhere near the range [0,20].

Code: Select all

# 3ds Max Wavefront OBJ Exporter v0.97b - (c)2007 guruware
# File Created: 21.11.2015 10:50:05

#
# object room
#

v  -372.6478 0.0000 383.4310
v  -293.9077 0.0000 383.4310
v  -293.9077 0.0000 -403.9706
v  -372.6478 0.0000 -403.9706
v  -215.1675 0.0000 383.4310
v  -215.1675 0.0000 -403.9706
...

Sure you can export all the objects as a single mesh with different materials but you will have to look that up in the 3DS max manual. That's how most people do it (i.e. 1 obj for all the objects).

cheers,
Thomas