Making a Hemi-cubic 3D Camera in Maya
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | Page 5Step 10
Go to
Create>NURBS Primitives>Cube
and create a 1x1x1 cube at the origin.
Step 11
Move the cube down on the Y axis to -0.505. This will position the cube a tiny bit below the center viewpoint of the F,L,R,B cameras.
Step 12
Go to the hypergraph window. There you will see that a NURBS cube is actually six planes under a group node. Select and delete the top and bottom planes, leaving a sort of "fence" around the group camera viewpoint.
The purpose of this "fence" is to mask the bottom half of the F,L,R,B camera views so as to save render time. If for any reason you need the bottom half of your image, leave this feature out. This would be if you plan to make an environment cube, or if you plan to make use of a "tilt" feature in a stitching program.
Step 13
In the hypergraph view, middle mouse drag on the cube's group node and drag it onto the camRig node to group it with the cameras.
Step 14
This view shows the properly arranged nodes in the hypergraph view, with the cube renamed "CamMask".
In this view, I have also scaled the cube a bit on the X and Z axes. Be careful not to scale it on the Y as this can raise it up and make it block the camera view.
