Cameras, Viewpoints, and Lens Shaders
The best way to make an audience see what you want them to see is to get the camera to do the work. The camera in Softimage is similar to a physical camera in the real world. It defines the view that you can render. You can add as many cameras as you want in a scene.
Cameras are different from viewpoints. A viewpoint allows you to see a scene in a 3D view in a specific way. You can choose from four default viewpoints in the 3D view: User, Front, Top, and Right. You can also choose a camera view in a 3D view to see what the camera sees. For more information about selecting views, see Viewing 3D Objects [ Interface and Tools ].
In many ways, cameras and viewpoints are similar, except that viewpoints are not actual objects: they are only tools for viewing your scene. You cannot animate a viewpoint, nor can you render from a viewpoint as you can from a camera. If you’d like to animate or render a viewpoint view, you can synchronize a camera with the viewpoint and animate the camera (see [here]).
The active camera is the camera that is associated with the current render pass. The final render uses only a single camera associated with a render pass. You can define which camera to use to render specific frames; for example, you can use camera A to render frames 1 to 30 and camera B to render frames 31 to 100.
For information about setting the active camera for a render pass, see Controlling the Active Camera for the Render Pass [Rendering].
Nothing stops you from adding a second, third, or fourth camera to your scene. In fact, there is no limit to the number of cameras you can use to view your scene or render it. The main reason for having multiple cameras is to be able to switch between them for rendering different points of view—see Example: Switching Cameras.
A lens shader is a rendering subroutine that affects rays as they are emitted from the camera. Lens shaders let you achieve effects like fish-eye views, depth of field, lens flares, or cartoon effects. Softimage provides a library of lens shaders that you can experiment with to create many different effects, see Lens Shaders [Shader Reference].
In general, you can apply lens shaders the same way you would any other shader, see Applying and Editing Shaders [Material and Shader Basics]. However, you can also apply a number of lens shaders directly to a camera’s shader stack, see Adding Lens Shaders to the Camera. If you load a scene with shaders attached to the camera, they appear as subnodes of the camera in the scene explorer. In addition, lens shaders can be added at the pass-level as described in Applying Shaders to Passes [Rendering].
Autodesk Softimage v.7.5