Matching cameras - Nodal trick?

Thu Mar 23, 2017 2:57 pm

Hi Octanians,

I am setting up a scene where some elements are rendered in Octane, and others in the native LW renderer and then composited. However I discovered the cameras do not match. I read something in another users post about the "Nodal Trick", but I can't find anymore information on it. Can anyone shed some light on how to match the native render output and the Octane output? Thanks in advance!

Thu Mar 23, 2017 3:53 pm

Never mind. The mismatch seems to have been caused by having the octane camera in auto focus. my bad.

Thu Mar 23, 2017 4:58 pm

I'm not sure about the nodal trick matching native camera.. maybe.. but the nodal trick was specific to being able to use a null's (or mesh's I guess) distance to camera to drive the DOF, which is really, really nice, and quite useful in many animation cases.

Here is one thread that shows this: viewtopic.php?f=36&t=60060&p=307283

Thu Mar 23, 2017 6:07 pm

Thanks for the reply. I've seen that info regarding matching DOF, and yes it's very handy. The issue I was having turned out to be a "Warp Stabilizer VFX" effect that got placed inadvertently on the layer with the Octane render. God only knows how the effect got there, must have been some keystroke combination or something, because I didn't put it there intentionally. I thought it was related to the Octane auto-focus feature, because I turned that off and rendered a new frame and suddenly it matched. But once I discovered that errant effect, the cameras match fine. I hate it when stuff like that happens, wasting a lot of time trying to find a fix for something that didn't need to be fixed. Sorry for the false alarm.