Grasshopper - Animating Camera Tilt - Not Working

[paul-twoatsix]

I've been doing a bit of testing with the Vray animation tools in grasshopper and have noticed that when I render still images using the tilt input and "Looking Through Camera" option it works correctly and renders out the desired camera tilt. But when I setup up an animated camera tilt, "Export Camera Animation" and then "Render Animation in Rhino" there is no tilt animated at all - it's always the default 0 degree tilt setting throughout the whole camera movement (Even though I saw the camera icon rotate correctly when the camera animation was exported from grasshopper).

GH setup & Vray settings attached.

Gif showing stills attached.

Animation output MP4 via link below.

[paul-twoatsix]

It looks like the Field of View (FOV) is also not working when the camera is exported and the animation is rendered in Rhino.

[paul-twoatsix]

It looks like I'll be answering my own thread...

For anyone who's interested - The "Human" plugin "Modify Viewport" component is the answer!! With the added benefit that it gives you an active preview of the animation in the viewport (which you can specify via the Viewport Name input).

No real need for the Vray Camera component anymore - apart from maybe a quick way to get the camera position and target points from named viewports in Rhino. I haven't tried animating the F-number, shutter speed or ISO - although I can't really see a reason that I would need to.

[paul-twoatsix]

Not so fast! Modify Viewport works for Lens Length, but not for Rotation / Tilt using the Up Vector input?! Once again rendering a single frame works correctly but rendering an animation does not?!

Anyone from ChaosGroup like to chip in here? I'm running out of workaround ideas and I'm struggling to understand what you guys have against rotating a camera during an animation?

[paul-twoatsix]

A further update - and "answer".

Rendering in Grasshopper (using Vray Render component - without using Vray Render in Project) works with Camera Field of View (FOV) and Tilt. It does mean that you need to get all of your geometry into grasshopper in order to render out an animation, and that you're limited to the preset render settings - (is there no way to import .vropt files to grasshopper?)

Exporting Vray proxies can be a bit tedious, but would be a must for more complex scenes as I can imagine grasshopper getting extremely slow if you want to start animating a lot of complex brep geometry.

This works for me for now - will let you all know if I come across anymore limitations.

[nikolay.bakalov]

Hi,

exporting the camera animation to Rhino only exports the position. The function is designed to match the three native Rhino camera animation commands. Respectively the "Export Sun Animation" function, exports only the position and intensity of the sun to match the Rhino sun animation command.

in fact both export functions simply overwrite the data we get from the 4 native Rhino animation commands. That is why an option to pick an animation source appears in the asset editor. It just switches the data source, not the data format itself

For full camera (or any other) animation you shall render in Grasshopper instead.

[paul-twoatsix]

Thanks for the explanation nikolay.bakalov. It might be worth pointing out this limitation in the documentation (link below).