Eliminating Diorama Effect
nelsonsmith
Posts: 1,336
Every now and then I notice that some renders have an unintentional diorama effect. I know this is caused by camera settings, but I haven't yet figured out exactly which setting is actually causing it.
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I'm not sure what you mean - something to do with depth-of-field?
An example render will be very helpful here...
"Diorama effect" -- if you mean an exaggerated perspective, then that's controlled by the camera settings. You can track a camera back and forth, and the perspective doesn't change. You can zoom it, and the perspective changes, including odd-looking "fisheye" effects.
Go into the camera panel and experiment with the focal length settings.
If the intention is to eliminate accidental "miniature" or "tilt shift" look in a mid to large scale scene
the camera settings to tweak
1. Depth of Field - increase area of sharp focus, fine tune fall-off radius. Both unwanted (or sought after) miniaturization is mainly tweaked here.
2. Focal length - make it typical wide angle lens will stretch-widen the corners and expands horizon, and vice versa. This contributes somewhat to 'diorama' effect but not as much as DoF.
Sorry, went off for the weekend. Here's an example of what I meant, but I will experiment with the Focal Length and DoF.
Nothing miniature abt your examplea ctually...the set seems smaller with focal length set high-ish. Popular trick with some outdoor action scene filming, or big moon shots.
As to diorama...some people have fun making real life big scenes into miniatures, when shooting or in post.
http://www.serif.com/appresources/HPX6/Tutorials/en-us/tutorials/creative_tiltshift_miniature.htm
This begs the question: how are you using the term "diorama"? There are miniature AND full-size dioramas -- most any natural history museum will have several.
What I see is flat lighting and static poses. Is this what you mean? Or do you mean something else? I had assumed you were talking about the forced curve most dioramas used for their backdrop, which can cause perspective issues at different camera angles.
I'm also a little confused by the "diorama" term. If it is the flat-lighting-static-poses as Tobor suggested then a good place to start would be a lighting/composition/photography tutorial on Youtube.
Is the example given, I would (1) chooses a slightly wider lens and get closer, (2) lower the camera and tilt it ("dutch") to frame the action, (3) decrease depth of field to throw the BG out of focus and get some seperation between the BG and FG Characters, (4) relight everything based on the light sources (a more "Rembrant"approach maybe), and not an over-all even exposure, which would also help seperate the BG and FG. A good refernce for this type of scene is "Alien"(Ridely Scott) which is anything but a diorama.
Of course you may mean something else entirely, which means we have both wasted our time. ;-)
If that image has a problem (many people would be fine with it), perhaps it is not the lights or camera, but the action: that is, the character poses feel to me like frozen movement. Like human models are posing to look like they're stepping forward, raising a weapon, etc. Or so it seems to me...
I guess diorama is the wrong term, sinse photographers sometimes purposefully achieve this effect, It's called tilt shift photography. Things is all renders don't come out with the effect, and I'm stumped as to why this one did.
here is an example of Tilt shift.
The cameras in D|S don't provide for a way to control tilt-shift (at least for Iray; I'm not sure about a custom 3DL camera), but a similar selective focus effect can be produced with depth of field, as has already been mentioned to you. It can also be done in image editing software like Photoshop.
I think the solution is going to be to arrange the action on a larger set. The Marcoor Control Room beautiful set that it is, is not a big set piece, nor does it allow you to remove all the walls in order to back the camera off, so going wider wasn't really an option. Just purchased the hangar set, so we'll see how this idea plays out where I can get the characters further away from the back ground as well as get the camera further away from my subjects.
At this stage it's all a matter of seeing what can and can't be done.
If scale is not the issue, you can always soimply enlarge the scale of the set, and put normal size people inside. Sometimes you can enlarge the walls separate from the floor and other elements. This will increase spatial depth.
While removable walls is always best, you could slice off the front of the set using an Iray sectioning plane (assuming you're using Iray). This is what the section plane is for. Apply the plane, rotate it so that it's vertical, and adjust its position to remove the front wall. When rendered Iray will not see anything on the camera side of the plane.
Still confused. Do you want the tilt-shift effect or not?
I wish to eliminate it. The tilt-shift effect makes things look as if one is photographing minatures, which is why I at first referred to it as diorama effect, because it's that look you get in films sometimes when they photograph models and they are attempting to present them as the real thing, but the fact that they are models is obvious.
In real life photography the answer is to make larger scale models, but that total threw me that one would even get that effect in 3D as CG is only a simulation of reality and scale is relative. Usually Tilt-shift isn't a problem, things either look real or that look like bad models, they don't tend to look toy-like.
It can be a great effect if that's what one is aiming for, but you should be in control of exactly why and how you are getting it and this was the first time I ever noticed it in a render.
Yet the example you posted does not show tilt-shift, so what is there to eliminate? Everything is in focus, and there are no obvious perspective issues -- the walls are perfectly parallel, and the floor has the appropiate perspective for the scene. I will agree that the scene is static and dull, but I'm not sure you've adequately communicated what it is you're wanting ... or not wanting.
If all you mean is that the characters and objects look like posed toys, then the problem is not the camera but the material settings and lighting I think.
I guess I just totally blew it then. I found the reference, although I was working from memory. Back to the drawing board.
You can change the focal length of the lens...in the Camera settings. And just a small change can work wonders...what is used for the default is pretty much what you'd find on a 'fixed' lens, point and shoot. or 'standard' video camera.
http://expertphotography.com/understand-focal-length-4-easy-steps/
Also a slight change in perspective will do wonders, too...in the scene posted it's almost as if the viewer is looking down from the ceiling...so that means the camera was used by a tall person or was on the ceiling (drone?) instead of seeing it from an 'average' height viewpoint. (at least taller than the standing girl...)
50mm
65mm(default)
80mm
Ignore the floating tractor...I just threw the HDRI up and rendered, it isn't part of the scene I'm working on, just used to tractor to illustrate the focal length.
As you can see, a fairly small change (15 mm) can make a dramatic difference in the shot. Nothing else was altered between shots.
Actually this (great image, BTW) is a good example of why you should do some graphics post-production (like photoshop)! Graphically it's very simple. You could shoot the foreground and background as seperate passes, layer them in PS (or any graphics program -- I use PAINT.NET) and play with the contrast and softness on each layer. Mucha faster than tryng ot set up FG and BG lighting,and then get your depth of field.
Good luck!
That's a thought, I haven't done a lot of PS post production work, but I'm rapidly seeing that it's a indispensable part of CG artwork as everything can't be done "in camera" .