Orthographic camera workflow question

[aaron_barreras]

What is the best workflow for orthographic cameras?

I'm getting varied results, depending on what combination of camera settings and tags I use. I don't think this is a bug, rather a limitation on how it's used, but I just wanted to make sure I'm not missing something obvious.

—If I create a standard C4D Ortho camera and render it, the viewport matches the IPR perfectly.

—But, if I add an Arnold tag to it and set it to Ortho, the viewport is still fine, but the IPR is wildly off.

—Alternatively, if I create, from scratch, an Arnold ortho camera from the plugin menu, the viewport is stuck in perspective, but the IPR is correctly rendered as ortho.

So, I guess my question is, what's the purpose of the Arnold ortho camera and tag, when the standard C4D ortho works the best?

In other words, without having to add any tags, the built in ortho camera matches the viewport and IPR correctly. Creating an Arnold ortho camera directly from the plugin menu does not match the viewport, which makes it difficult to visually line up a shot. And putting an Arnold ortho tag on an already ortho C4D camera does very strange things.

Attached is an example file showing the differences. Again, I don't think this is a bug, but I'm curious as to the "right" approach when using orthographic views.

ortho_question.zip

[peter.horvath6V6K3 · Accepted solution]

I'd consider it as a bug. The first and second case (adding a tag to a C4D Ortho cam) should be the same. The idea would be to use the transformation of the camera based on the selected projection and then override the camera type with the tag. So in the third case a perspective camera is created (visible in the viewport) and it's used as an ortho camera in Arnold.

I'd recommend using the native camera projections and override the camera type only when it's no available natively (like fisheye or vr_camera).