I want to duplicate an interior photo I have of an old house, but I'm trying to figure out the camera setting. I know the camera is fairly low, about kneeling height. But instead of the typical perspective where the walls move inward as you go up, it's the opposite. The walls move out as you go up. Now, I figure that must be a fairly shallow camera setting, less than 35mm. But just what I don't know, without getting too much of a fisheye effect. Any ideas?

That kind of distortion (paralax) occurs when the camera is lower than the target.

This is a common problem that architectural photographers deal with every day. We in the digital world can correct this easily, but photgraphers need to use the features of a view camera to correct this.

The lens distortion from a short lens is a different thing but may also be happening in your photo.

I've done what your doing before and trial and error is the best approach.

Max does have a camera match utility that you could try. I never had any luck with it.

Bones

you completely lost me with this question can you give more infomation

Anthony

I don't really know how better to explain it. In a normal photo, without correction, if you shoot up from a low angle, like trying to shoot a tall building, the perspective shrinks as you go up. It distorts. So it looks like the walls are moving inward as you go up. I'm sure you've seen this distortion in Max. In fact, Max even exagerrates it a bit. But in this photo that I want to emulate, the camera is near the floor, shooting up a stairway. But instead of that normal kind of perspective distortion, it's opposite, so that it looks as if the walls, all the lines are moving out as you go upward. I can't figure out how to emulate that perspective trick. A fisheye camera would curve the lines. And I'm afraid I'm not so good at modeling that I could lean everything like that in the modeling process.

when you are using the camera are you using the show save frames in your Pview? so your scene does not get  distorted? 

Don't forget CGI camera work differently to real world cameras

If your using vray set the "vertical shift" to a positive number on the vray phyical camera.

In Cinema 4D there are some additional viewport views (Other than top,left,front,etc.)

Are there any such views in the newer versions of MAX?...

Would these alternate views even solve your problem?

Tom

Max has Top, Bottom, Front, Back, Right, and Left views available, plus Camera views for any cameras you create, and a user-definable "User" view. (I've never experimented with the User view so I don't know anything about it).

If this info does not help then try putting this in the autodeskforum lighting threads

Good luck

LCA

Attached Link: http://www.tutorialsworkshop.com

Create a model! We won’t be discussing the modeling process here, as it’s something I have already covered in my previous post. So at this point I’ll assume that you have either completed my previous tutorial, or you can comfortably model from photographic reference. We’ll now move on to discuss the shader, material and rendering setup.

For this tutorial I’ll be using the setup below, which is very similar to that used in my previous tutorial (Premium subscribers can download the full scene file and follow along.) To produce the projection we’ll be using the Camera Map Per Pixel shader. This shader lets you project an image through a scene camera onto the geometry to which the shader is applied, and it is incredibly useful for things such as matte painting. Whilst quick to setup and not without it’s limitations, this technique is incredibly powerful and can garner incredible results with a minimum of fuss!

Step 2

Press M on your keyboard to open up the Material Editor.

Step 3

Click on the grey box next to Diffuse to open up the Material Map Browser.

Step 4

Assign a Camera Map Per Pixelshader to the diffuse channel of the material as shown. The settings for the shader are explained below :

• Camera – This needs to be the static camera through which our texture will be projected. Click it once to turn it on, and then choose the camera from your scene by selecting it in a viewport. Once assigned, the camera’s name appears on the button. This camera is then also used to render the Texture and ZBuffer Mask components detailed below.
• Texture – You can assign any kind of map to this channel, however typically this is where you put the file you want to project – in our case the background image we used to model the scene.
• ZBuffer Mask – You can remove certain areas of your model from the project in two ways. Here, you can assign an image file that contains Z-depth data which, when used with the ZFudge value, can ‘crop’ out parts of the projection based on their distance from the camera.
• Mask – The second method to remove areas from your projection is to use this mask channel. This uses a greyscale image in which the black areas of the mask create transparent pixels in your projection, white areas create opaque pixels, and gray areas are partially transparent dependant on the gray value itself.
• Remove Back Face Pixels – When on, this setting excludes faces from the projection if they point more than a certain angle away from the camera. The angle is defined by the Angle Threshold value, and this setting defaults to on.

Step 5

Before applying our new material we have to select all of the polygonal objects in the scene that we wish to project onto, and Attach them together, creating a single object. find more on http://www.tutorialsworkshop.com