Physical Camera to Vray Camera

[ryan_companies]

I'm looking to convert a standard physical camera that's animated to a Vray Physical camera. I've seen a lot of scripts that are pretty old that no longer seem to work, specifically LeLe's Vray Tools. Does anyone know of a good way to do this in Max 2022?

[GLASS-CANVAS]

This would be a great script to have! And seeing that Lele now works at Chaos, I wonder if he could help the community out by getting his old script to work? Would be hugely appreciated

[^Lele^]

Eh yes, i stopped supporting those tools in 2008.
Are they still laying around somewhere?

Alas, this will convert all the max physical cameras selected (the selection can be entirely arbitrary, containing anything else.), or if none is selected it'll try and convert all the max physical cameras present in the scene.
It caters for animation, the white balance presets and all the various oddities chucked into the max Physical camera.
What it doesn't do (currently, perhaps ever) is support the shutter angle (i.e. movie camera) as the max Physical infers those values, and doesn't have the corresponding pair of properties available.

Just select the cameras you'd like converted (or not, to convert them all), and run the script.

Word of warning: this has *not* been through rigorous QA.
It's currently given without support.
Should there be interest, we'll see about making it part of the standard converters.
For now, use at your own peril, and expect issues.

p.s.: I used this wiki page to figure out the temperatures present in the max physcam white-balance list. I have no idea of what has been used at AD, although it'd be safe to assume the two ought to match.

[ryan_companies]

Wow, thank you so much for this Lele -- it works like a charm! I use Syntheyes a fair amount for camera matching and it exports as a Max Physical Camera, this makes things much easier. Would love to see this integrated into a future version of Vray but for now this script is exactly what I needed.

[GLASS-CANVAS]

Awesome stuff Lele. We also use Syntheyes and would like the ability to do a worry-free conversion from Physical to V-Ray cameras

[^Lele^]

You're very welcome, please let me know if it somehow misbehaves (although it ought to be mighty fine for your use case).

[Morne]

Is there a specific reason to use VRay Cameras over the Max Physical Cameras?

[^Lele^]

The Max Physical was given to AD by us.

There is only one thing missing from our camera, and will be added soon (Lens Breathing), while we do a much more competent job at exposure (no need for odd tone map operators), and generally at how the camera sits with max (try scripting, f.e., or the UI)

Ofc, a max physical will now work with Arnold (how awkward.), so if you swap often, perhaps that's the easiest way forward.

[dean_dmoo]

Hey lele,

Can you expand on the better exposure handling?

Currently we use the max physical cam for the ev workflow. (Moved over when the vraycam got "removed"). But reading up in the docs I see that the vraycam also has the ev workflow now. Prefer not to have to fiddle about with exposure settings to get the wanted dof. So if the advantages are worth it we will move over again.

Thanks

[^Lele^]

Sorry for the delay, i thought i had replied, but i never posted it.
Yeah, we don't need the exposure control in the tonemapping operators (although one could add one for global control.), and we always do exposure linearly, unlike the one that comes with Max (at least, under certain circumstances).
Exposure can now be entirely unlinked from the camera settings for f-stops, and shutter speed, with exposure mode set to EV.