Camera Distortion not taken into account

[Olli96]

I've got a problem with the camera distortion in sp3. The rendering doesnt match the viewport display which makes it quite hard to camera match a scene. To illustrate the problem i attached a screenshot. It renders like if the distortion parameter is set to 0.
I am using max2009 and vray sp3 (64bit).

[Neilg]

I thought this was a known thing, and it's because max's viewports cant display the distortion correctly. You should be able to match that with field of view, there wont be much noticable distortion that far back.

[Olli96]

Whoops, didnt know it was a known thing So whats the workaround here and why do we have that distortion parameter if it doesnt work? I also have some closeup shots and playing with the FOV to get it right is not that easy - i guess i can cheat a bit...

[Neilg]

It does work... just not in the viewport. You could always butcher your settings and do a bit of trial and error stuff.

Camera tracking software like boujou/syntheyes can give you the distortion value you need so the render will snap straight into the footage, which does actually work very well.

[Olli96]

Thanks for the advice, i guess for now i can cheat it and push some pixels in ps so that it matches up.

[dlparisi]

Just a guess, but could you use a camera projection of the background onto a self-illuminated, non-shadowcasting plane? This would let the plane be distorted by the vray camera so they should line up.

[Olli96]

I'll keep that in mind for the next time, this time i think i can get away with adjusting the fov.