Camera Controllers

Camera Controllers are intended to be attached to cameras in your modeler. They can be set to compute additional maps for the purposes of shadow, reflections or special effects. A Camera Controller appearance, in conjunction with the object it's attached to, encapsulate the information required to generate additional rendering passes. Resulting images can be referenced through a special notation described later.

You can create a new Camera Controller through the Palette Menu. Double-clicking on the new appearance brings up a different version of the standard Appearance Editor Window.

Compute Maps
This allows you to specify the how often your map needs to be recomputed.
- never
- once per job
- every frame
Map Type
Choose the type of map. To create pointlight (six pass shadows), you should attach the camera controller to a pointlight in your scene.
- shadow
- reflection
- environment
- reference image (unimplemented)
Map Resolution
Choose the rendering resolution. Images must be powers of two due to restrictions by prman.
- 256
- 512
- 1024
- 2048
- 4096
Objects in Map
Choose the name of the set of objects to partcipate in map computation. If nothing is specified all objects will appear. See *TOR docs for more info. Choo

Notation for Referring to Computed Maps

In order to refer to a computed map, your shader (or one of ours) must contain a parameter of the appropriate type (string) which knows how to handle the computed map's type. To refer to computed maps we've provided some special commands as part of the animated parameter support. The following expressions simply evaluate to the string repesenting the name of the appropriate computed maps file. MTOR evaluates this expression and RIB Generation time and looks up the attributes of the Camera Controller associated with cameraname. These attributes are used, in conjunction with RenderMan Globals and your current project location to produce the correct file reference. NB: the square brackets ([]) are required syntax. And here's an example: [shdmap perspShape]. This refers to the shadowmap associated with the camera named perspShape in your scene. Presumably this shadowmap will be used in conjunction with a spotlight-like lightsource shader because it was computed from a perspective camera.