Weird clipping when using Isometric camera

[shawn]

My simple room setup starts to clip in a strange way when I zoom out too far with an Isometric camera.

The client wants to use this isometric look for a stylized, simple room setup. The room is approximately real world scale. My camera just sits in the middle of the room, but the isometric view creates this third-person perspective. Adjusting the zoom makes the room smaller or bigger in the frame.

If I'm zoomed in enough to just frame the "box" of the room nothing is clipped, but if I zoom out the floor plane gets cropped.

The attached scene includes my room plus a large sphere which will also get its front face cut off when the camera is zoomed out too far.

Switching the camera to Perspective and moving it outside of the room allows me to pull back as far as I'd want, but that's not a true Isometric.

Is this a bug or am I missing some weird clipping plane setting? Clipping is turned off on the camera.

Thanks.

Shawn

isometric-reducedc4d.zip

[peter.horvath6V6K3]

It seems like a bug. I'll take a look and try to fix this in the next release.

[shawn]

That would be swell, thanks. I'm hoping this won't affect my current project, due at the beginning of September.

I'd note that the clipping isn't limited to just the front of the scene; it's like a box surrounding the whole scene, clipping anything OUTSIDE the box. I thought scaling down the room, allowing me to set the camera zoom to 1 or higher would fix the clipping, but it's still there, and when I moved the sphere around the TOP would get clipped.

I don't think this is related to the Isometric camera issue, but I found that if I try to move either the ---Set--- null or Walls null (in my sample scene) while the IPR is running C4D (R19) either locks up or crashes, every time. This happens for both Isometric and standard Perspective cameras.

[Anonymous]

@Shawn Marshall I actually just finished a job that was using Isometric cameras at the start. However, at some point during the project, my isometric cameras started showing the same clipping issue. I then made the decision to switch to perspective cameras at an extremely high focal length (1000mm) which gave me almost exactly the same zero-perspective look without all the issues. Something to also note, when sharing cameras with Maya, Max, Nuke or After Effects, isometric cameras will not port over correctly. For this reason, Isometric cameras are no good for working in a multi-app pipeline. So it's not a bad idea to make the switch now if you can.

[shawn]

Thanks for the insight, Dade. Although I won't have to share these scenes with other 3D apps I might have to bring the 3D data into After Effects for compositing text, so going with a standard perspective camera with a very long lens might be the best way to go.

I'm not a huge fan of a 100% isometric look, so I'm hoping the client will give me a bit of leeway.

Cheers.

Shawn

[peter.horvath6V6K3]

I think what's happening is that some objects are actually behind the camera in the Arnold scene. That's why the clipping. The plugin adds some offset trying to avoid this, but I guess it's just not enough. You can try to offset the position in the scene as a workaround, for instance 1000 cm in each component (X,Y,Z).

As for the crash in the IPR, I'm not able to reproduce it so far. Does it happen every time you try to move those Null objects?

[shawn]

Thanks again for the replies, Peter.

I'm going to use the faux Isometric approach Dade described; I think that will make for less headaches down the road.

Yes, C4D crashes every time I try to manipulate the "Walls" null when the IPR is running, no matter if I try to grab the null and drag it or I try to scrub its position in the Attributes Manager. I can drag the Figure and Cube objects just fine; the issue seems to be with nulls.

I can provide a bug report if that would help.

Best.

Shawn

[peter.horvath6V6K3]

The bugreport might help. What's your plugin version? Win or OSX?

[shawn]

Just noticed the comment feature here.

I'm working on an aging Mac Pro with a crummy ATI Radeon graphics card running C4DtoA 2.3.1.2 on C4D R19-something.

I've attached the Bug Report.

Thanks.

Shawn

[peter.horvath6V6K3]

Indeed, C4DtoA 2.3.1.2 hangs/crashes when I move the Walls null. However C4DtoA 2.3.1.3 works fine here, so I guess the issue has been fixed. Could you please check that version to see if the problem goes away?

[shawn]

I'm in the middle of a production; I'll upgrade when I get a chance, thanks.

Shawn

[chatect]

I got this bug today, so apparently its still an issue ? BUT im commenting to say your 1000m focal length workaround works great. thank you for leaving that here!