Setting up the camera

You can render a frame with Render | Render Image (F12), or you can render all of them with Render | Render Animation (Ctrl + F12).

Don’t get ahead of yourself, though! Does your scene have a camera?

Figure 5.2: A camera object

If it doesn’t, you’ll get this error message when you try to render:

Figure 5.3: Error message when trying to render without a camera

The camera is a critical object. If we think of our 3D scene as a movie set and our animated objects as actors, then our camera may be thought of as the camera. It’s not a deep analogy. Just like a real-life camera, our scene will be captured through the “lens” of this virtual camera.

The scenes you downloaded for the exercises in part one of this book did not have a camera, which makes them incomplete for rendering. Let’s add one and set it up now.

Adding a camera to the scene

You can...