Custom Camera

#1

Hi,
I hope this post will not come across as completely insane. I am less than a Blender newbie, but I have experience modelling and rendering in other packages and have Python experience.

I have a specific scenario that I wish to determine if it is possible to accomplish in Blender.

I wish to create a 3d environment which will be a cube, the inside walls of which will be textured. I will then light the inside of my cube, place a camera inside the cube, rotate and translate the camera about to view the textured inside walls of my cube.

The question I would like to ask is this; is it possible to create a custom camera in Blender?
The reason I ask is that I have a particular specialized camera in mind.

The camera that I wish to model is a linear sensor array with lens that is described at the Texas Advanced Optoelectronics Solutions (TAOS) website.
Links are:
the linear sensor array
<http://www.taosinc.com/ProductDetails.aspx?id=%2013>
and
the lens package
<http://www.taosinc.com/getfile.aspx?type=press&file=dn2_selfoclens_b.pdf>

Here is a link to a paper that fully describes the camera I would like to model:
<http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/87985/files/Final%20Report%20-%20Miniature%20Cameras%20for%20Ultra-Light%20Flying%20Robots.pdf>

Thanks for your help.
Jeff

#2

I am not a science guy, but…
The Blender camera is just a typical 3d camera with perspective or orthographic view, but…
There is this nifty thing, called baking, which lets you bake textures and materials to images. You just need a mesh of special shape and possibly subsurfed, which should have UV map assigned, but its tricky to make it regular (the UV). Then you give it a material which is 100% reflective and no specular, except if you want a blob for the light source. Make sure no part of the mesh have normals pointing to any other part of it. Then you just bake the full render and get nice although not really high quality custom shape camera. But I am not sure if it is what you wanted.
This is the end.

#3

Thank you dac77. This information you provide will help in setting up my environment when it becomes apparent that I will be able to make a custom camera. I have looked at a couple of tutorials concerning baking textures. I have edited my original post with a link to more information concerning the camera I wish to model.

regards,
Jeff

#4

Well, having had a look at Blender’s Python API and the Blender source tarball I’ve concluded that what I wanted to do is not possible (for me) to do within Blender. I’ve decided on another tack. I can build my environment, place a camera, lights etc. then take snapshots and export to an available image format and then postprocess using software of my choice.

regards,
Jeff

#5

Generally, that sounds more realistic … considering the odds. However, it is possible to create a custom camera (if it exists in real life … computers can emulate it). It would have taken a much much longer time to achieve though. We are talking serious scripting here … one enthusiastic artist is not sufficient to bring programmers into that realm.

Besides, you have excellent renderers. All you need is a gallery of shots taken with the camera you described, and knowing what to tweak to achieve similar effects.

#6

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