Hey Doug,
Thanks a lot for your interest! The delay is on my side, sorry about that. The “Photography for 3D Artists” series, with its many themes, provided the need for a lot of research. There was a moment a while ago, where I noticed that all of these parts need a sub series, to connect all of them. In Art or point-and-shoot photography there is a lot of material available, which seems to build up on the old Film-SLR knowledge, and with that, it runs easily into problems—to really get the DSLR material correct. On the other hand, the digital photography seems so similar to renderings, and the starting integration of physical plausible renderings, that many of the differences needed to be addressed here carefully. These differences are critical—if quality is wanted. In short: shooting for 3D scenes, requires to know these differences mentioned above.
The future is certainly “physical plausible” as many render engine developments have shown that over the last decade alone. It doesn’t need a great prophetic skill to see that this will lead to an operational basis which will take the idea of photography as set up idea, e.g., “Stops” and “Exposure-Values (EV)”. Needles to say that a good knowledge-base will be mandatory in the future for that. Thinking like a photographer is certainly an advantage in 3D, and I have certainly not the “automatic” options of a camera in mind ;o) There is a lot of instruction work to do, and I fear the un-learing of wrong information is the main part here, a reason why I go into detail.
In short, the work that I have done so far will hopefully provide a good and appropriate base for 3D. To say it a little bit more bold: It is (to my knowledge) the largest photography series ever done for 3D artists.
I build up on over three decades professional experience (photography) and of course parts of my dissertation, where I had portions of film-making as well integrated, e.g., camera tech and lenses.
I have created here a massive course which will hopefully going to provide a proven method for 3D. My intention was of course to clean up with so many mis-information given in this field. (I watched in the past year alone over 1,000 tutorials about photography and have read many books, to get everything savvy. Needless to say that a lot of the material never found a permanent place on my shelf after going through those, to say it politely.
You asked about the Projection Manger (PM). For me, the PM is a) the follow up tool after setting up a Camera Projection with the Camera Calibrations tool, or b) the options to set up the first Camera Projection for a pure Digital Matte Painting. For both cases, every further step is most-likely a patch work, to overcome coverage problems with the natural limited view of the initial projection-camera. I like to call it as well PM, but with the idea of a Patch-Manager.
The Projection Manager, is not a tool nor option to find any position with the camera, it manages the cameras and related objects/textures in a certain way. Normally when I get this question to explain the PM, people assume that this will manage the positions/perspective relation of the camera and object(s). This is not the case. In a nutshell, the PM manager supports the repetitive work of rendering, from (new) cameras, additional coverage and opens this ,e.g., in Photoshop. There you work on the render, and perhaps on an Alpha channel to limit the patch area to your needs. Any set of such relation will be in the PM overview. A great tool!
I hope I go enough into depth in the series about Camera Projections, especially with my awarded (... highest award in Cinematography at the International Film-Festival WorldFest Houston) music video. This video clip will be part of a longer inspection of this technique, and the PM will be used here with some very time-saving techniques. I look forward to have these online.
So, you asked about the PM, and I answered with a long photography theme. I did this as we will see how connected, HDRI, Panorama, Camera Projection and Texture-Creation is in 3D scenes are, and that this needs a complete concept. Such a concept is not discussed as whole anywhere else to my knowledge, certainly not in such detail and for CINEMA 4D only ;o)
I have shot and recorded the last fifty days straight, seven days a week, to get one single sub-series alone done, after a long development phase. I’m pretty confident that this will support the quality of a lot of projects.
Again, thanks for asking and please shoot any question that you have here in the forum. I’m happy to share here at Cineversity. :o)
Have a great day
Sassi
