Camera Setting issues on Large Scale Scene

[pmoreira]

Hey guys...

I am in the midst of modeling a futuristic city in Maya and have been trying to get around and issue which I believe can be resolved through my camera settings however, I'm I have not been able to tweak the Camera attributes in a satisfactory way yet - so hopefully someone can assist.

As mentioned, I have modeled a city, in particular I have created a sort of Vortex Cylinder type thing which two speeders will race through. Now my issue here is scale. I'd like to give the impression that the speeder will be extremely dwarfed by this huge vortex. The scale I am looking for in laymen terms would be a Pea in a Oil Barrel - :)

I know this is done in feature films and It will make a huge difference to the scene, however no where on the net have I been able to find tuts or some Production like Camera tips in Maya to help - Note that resizing geometry in the scene does not change the rendered result.

I'm hoping this was descriptive enough (perhaps I over did it abit) - But any help would be greatly appreciated. I have also attached two images as a reference of scale.

Cheers
pmoreira


DT Gang - Could you possibly create some tuts on the site for this? It makes a great part of your work if you can render our quality shot scenes when your Camera is setup correctly.

As always lots of respect goes out to the DT team for a great site and community!
:headbang:

[danlefeb]

I don't see any attached screenshots - but if your issue is with the scaling of two different objects in relation to each other you can always render them out seperately on different layers and composite them together.

I guess I'm not sure I completely understand why your smaller geometry renders at the same size as your larger geometry. To use your example, if you model a pea and you model an oil barrel and then render both of 'em, your pea will render at the size you made it as will your oil barrel.

[pmoreira]

Hey Dan

Thanks for your reply.

I have attached the screen shot of one image as I cant upload anymore given the restriction to file size.

Could you go into detail on how I would follow the process you first mentioned perhaps that could be a good solution.

Perhaps the Camera Scale is somewhere I can tweak up to achieve that. Similar to how ILM originally shot the scaled models of the Imperial Ships etc with small miniature cameras to show the size in comparison to another smaller ship, is what I'm trying to recreate in 3D.

Don't know if I'm doing this in the wrong stage of the project though...

:(

Cheers
pmoreira

[danlefeb]

Well, the first question I'd ask is if your two speeders are going to hit the edge of the frame or not. If they're not then you won't have any issue rendering them on a different layer and compositing them in later. If they are then you're going to run into the issue of having them suddenly appear on frame and that'd look weird.

If I were in your position what I'd probably do to give you the best control would be to render the speeders on seperate layers and then the background on another layer. So you'd have at least three layers. Then you can pull those into a program like AE and put them together. If you run into the scaling issue of your frame then you can always animate the position of one of your speeder layers so it doesn't suddenly show up in the middle of the frame. Remember that you don't have to have everything look 100% correct in Maya to get the results you want. Thats what compositing is for! :-)

[pmoreira]

Thanks for your insight mate.

I will try to follow your "composite in later" approach and see how I go.

I'm not a strong Compositor so perhaps this is a new learning curve! :)

In any case I'll let you know how I got with it

As always, thanks for your prompt reply and willingness to help.

Cheers
Pat

[danlefeb]

Keep us posted on your progress and any further questions you may have!

[Jak_Carver]

pmoreira, I sent you a PM on how to solve your problem.