Getting right down to business, let's start with the various lens projection types Brazil offers. Some other renderers will call these different cameras, ie fisheye camera, architecture camera, etc, but with brazil there is only one Brazil Camera. You simply have many options with the single camera.

I'll explain the different Lens Projection types along with an image of the same scene to illustrate how they differ and what they are used for. For these images, the camera is set to a very wide lens (6mm lens, 143 degree FOV) as this is the easiest way to see the differences.

The Perspective Lens is the most basic, mimicing the max camera in the way it behaves.

The Spherical Lens acts more like a real camera. There is spherical distortion, which increases at wider FOV's. The image above, being a wide angle lens, behaves like a fisheye lens, bending objects that the max camera renders as straight.

The Panorama Lens will give you a wide angle horizontally, but acts as though one was rotating the camera, rendering a single column of pixels at a time. This makes things that are equidistant from the camera (all the vertical bars are the same distance from the camera) render the same way. This differs from the max camera's planar projection method, which distorts those vertical bars.

The Orthographic Lens will give you an orthographic projection from the cameras position and orientation. This is a bit like rendering from the User view.

The Environ Mapper Lens will give you a 360-degree (on both horizontal and vertical planes) panorama. This is ideal for creating reflection maps from a scene, or creating your own HDR from a 3d scene. This lens type behaves the same way, no matter what focal length or FOV is entered. It always gives you the 360 view.

The Brazil-specific lenses have a few options accessible from the little "..." button next to the drop down menu. These are fairly self-explainatory and generally pertain to image/camera aspect ratio and any cropping that can be done or prevented.

Moving along to the next area, there is a drop-down menu for camera type and an area with controls for Lens & Location.

The drop down menu just lets you choose between a free camera and targeted camera. Changing between the two shouldn't effect how the camera sees the scene, but if you have position keys on your camera target, and then convert to a free camera, those keys will be lost. Likewise, if you have rotational keys on your free camera, and then convert it to a targeted camera, those keys will be lost.

The next area gives you controls over the lens type and filmgate size, as well as gives you a few tools to make things easier. The spinners for focal length, and FOV are fairly self-explainatory, as they just determine how wide or narrow a lens/FOV you have on your camera. The focal length is in real-world camera terms (measurement from the middle of a lens, to the film plane) while the FOV is a more generic measurement (angle that the camera can see). These two spinners are linked and if you change one, the other will change as well.

The FOV is the horizontal angle by default, but this can be changed via the little button ( <-> ) to be measured either vertically or diagonally.

Also, the Brazil camera has the ability to change the filmgate size as well. This is another real-world camera measurement, although not found on the max default camera. The filmgate is the actual physical hole through which the film is exposed. The size of this denotes the area of actual 'film' being exposed through the camera lens, and also plays a role in determining the FOV. You will note that if you start changing the Filmgate spinner, the FOV value will change as well.

All this can be a bit confusing, without the aid of a camera to point at and say 'that bit right there' so Brazil includes a little camera setup wizard-type thing. If you poke the button labeled 'Focal Len' it will bring up a little dialog with some preset camera types and common lens lengths.

Next, is the Preserve View toggle button. Pressing this locks the view that you see through the camera, and allows you to change the other settings. The camera itself will move, while preserving your view. This can make for some easy Hitchcock-esque camera tricks, dollying the camera in, while widening the lens.

Finally, there is another spinner for setting the distance between the camera and the target. This, obviously, only works if the camera is a target camera, and not a free camera.

As far as the Brazil camera goes, that is about it. The environment range and clipping plane areas funciton as they do on a max camera. The Dpeth-of-Field area will be covered in more depth in the DOF tutorial. The only other section deals with how the camera displays in the viewport, which can be figured out with a little experimentation. There is also a small section for changing the camera icon, which also is fairly straight forward and easy to figure out.

So that's it for this tutorial, hopefull yit was helpful. If you have any further questions of things you feel should be included, please email me (using the contact button at the top of the page) and say so.

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