Cameras
The two-camera model — the viewport camera you work from and the shot camera that frames the render — and every control in the Camera panel.
Reference
- Panel
- Camera
- Menu
- View ▸ Shot Camera
A shot has two cameras, and they do different jobs. Confusing them is the most common early mistake, so it is worth stating plainly:
- The viewport camera is where you stand to work. Orbit, pan and dolly move it. It is never rendered. Nothing you do to it appears in the exported image.
- The shot camera is an object in the scene. It frames the final image, its transform can be keyframed, and it is what export renders through.
3D shots only
A 2D shot has neither camera. It has a page — the shot's resolution, outlined at the centre of the canvas — which is both what you draw on and what is exported. The Camera panel is not offered there, and View ▸ Shot Camera is not in the menu.
You can leave the viewport camera anywhere. You cannot leave the shot camera anywhere, because the shot camera is the shot.
Looking through the shot camera
Routes the view through the shot camera instead of the free viewport camera. Available in the View menu and as a button in the command bar; the button shows a filled video icon while it is on.
Turning it on changes two things at once.
Rendering switches to the camera's framing, so what you see is what will be exported. A dimmed border marks what falls outside the render frame — the scene continues past the edge of the frame, and the dimming is where it stops counting.
Navigation changes meaning. Through the shot camera, canvas gestures only reposition the frame, the way you would move a photograph under a loupe. A two-finger drag pans the frame, a pinch magnifies the preview, and neither moves the camera or the scene. This is deliberate: it would otherwise be impossible to inspect your framing without destroying it.
To move the camera itself, use the Camera panel below, or leave the shot camera view and drag the camera's gizmo in the free viewport.
The frustum
While you work in the free viewport, the shot camera draws in the scene as a frustum — the pyramid of space it can see. It moves live as you change the camera, which makes the free viewport the better place to position the camera and the shot camera view the better place to judge the framing.
The Camera panel
Reference
- Panel
- Camera
The Camera panel holds the shot camera's controls. It is available only while you are looking through the shot camera: at other times the dock greys it out rather than hiding it, so the layout does not reflow under your hands.
The panel appears in two places, with the same contents. It can be docked like any other panel, and it also appears as a floating panel at the bottom-trailing corner while you are looking through the camera and not in focus mode. The floating copy carries its own header — a drag grip, a collapse chevron, and a close button that turns the shot camera view back off.
Zoom
A digital magnification of the preview, shown to one decimal place. The minus and plus buttons step the preview by a factor of 1.25 down or up, and the third button returns it to 1×. It magnifies the preview without moving the camera and does not affect the render. Pinching on the canvas does the same thing.
Camera transform
These drive the shot camera itself. They work from the free viewport, where you watch the frustum move, and from the shot camera view, where you watch the framing reflow. 2D camera layers are unaffected by all of them.
The camera's focal length. Low values are wide angle, high values are telephoto; the readout appends the current band, reading wide below 600, tele above 1800, and normal between them.
Swings the camera horizontally around its point of interest.
Tilts the camera vertically around its point of interest. This is the range the panel gives you; the timeline's own field for the same property reaches further — see below.
The camera's distance from its point of interest.
Four arrow buttons that truck and pedestal the camera, one unit per tap. This stays a nudge deliberately: for precise placement, drag the camera's 3D gizmo instead.
Returns the shot camera to its default position and framing.
Orbit ↕ has two different limits
The Orbit ↕ slider in this panel stops at ±80°. The Orbit ↕ field on the timeline's Shot Camera row stops at approximately ±88.8°, so a keyframed value can sit about nine degrees beyond anything the panel will let you set by hand. If a camera tilt reads back as further than the slider's end, the value came from the timeline, not from here.
Animating the camera
The shot camera's transform is keyframable. The timeline carries a Shot Camera row — always present, always last — with its own set of properties:
| Row | What it animates |
|---|---|
| Position | The camera's eye position in 3D. |
| Point of Interest | The point the camera looks at. |
| Focal Length | The field of view, over the same 200–4000 range as the panel. |
| Orbit ↔ | Horizontal orbit. |
| Orbit ↕ | Vertical orbit. |
| Distance | Dolly distance, over the same 100–8000 range as the panel. |
Position and Point of Interest have no slider in the Camera panel — they are set by dragging the camera's gizmo in the free viewport, or typed and keyed on the timeline. Setting keyframes is covered under Keyframes.
Cameras and export
Export renders through the shot camera. The offscreen render reuses the same layer-compositing path the on-canvas preview draws with, and resolves the camera's field of view against the same author-space size the live view last drew at — so the framing you approve while looking through the shot camera is the framing the file comes out with.
The viewport camera plays no part in this. You can orbit away to the far side of the scene and export the same image. See Rendering.