Photographer - Camera Exposure, White Balance, Autofocus, Physical Lights, Bokeh, Render Queue

Hello!

I am releasing my first addon for Blender: Photographer! What does it do?

  • Adds Camera Exposure controls and Auto Exposure, per camera
  • Adds Camera White Balance, per camera
  • Adds Focus Plane debug
  • Adds Render resolution, Ratio presets, View Layers, per camera
  • User friendly Lens Tilt and Automatic Tilt for Archviz
  • Adds Autofocus Single and Autofocus Continuous to your camera
  • Control Motion Blur using Shutter speed or Shutter angle
  • Adds Physical Light units and Color temperature (version 3 and up)
  • LightMixer interface to control your lights (version 4 and up)
  • Emissive Mixer interface to control your emissive materios (version 4 and up)
  • Render Queue to manage your still and animation renders (version 4 and up)
  • Bokeh and Optical Vignetting (version 4 and up)
  • Camera Post Effects using Blender compositor
  • Light Gobos and IES textures
  • Dolly Zoom (version 4 and up)
  • Supports Cycles and EEVEE (note that some features are not compatible with EEVEE).
    LuxCore support only for version 4.

Photographer 5 is now available: https://chafouin.gumroad.com/l/xmgat

You can learn more about it by watching these videos:

Known limitation: Do not use the Power or Irradiance units if you want to be able to switch your scene between Cycles/EEVEE and LuxCore . Use any other unit (including Advanced Power) to make sure the conversion is possible using the Apply Photographer settings button or new Warning buttons.

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I tried Blender 2.79 and 2.79b. Got this error:
AttributeError: Writing to ID classes in this context is not allowed: Camera, Camera datablock, error setting Camera.dof_distance

When I click the checkbox in the Camera object Data tab, all settings dissapear.

Any idea what is could be?

Official versions seem to be, rigthfully so, more picky than the nightly builds. I’ll try to fix it ASAP.

EDIT: Fixed the issue.
If you want to make sure that the camera settings update properly when changing active cameras, please use the Make Active button in the Photographer panel.

You will also have to manually Reapply the settings if you changed the other properties in the Scene or cameras… this is less than ideal.

Congratulations Fabien! Nice work.
I especially love the per camera resolution feature. An invaluable addition to Blender imho.

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Thanks, after the fix it works now.
I will experiment with it. So far I enjoy the whitebalance and ratios.

I love it!

I noticed the AF-C could spam an error, it’s fixed now!

Thanks.
This is just what I have been waiting for,
absolutely brilliant.

great features… exposure per camera mainly. thank you

Very good addon - it’s so helpfull to find a mood a final render:)
Are You planning add some features like Corona VFB has? Contrast, some corrections for highlights (highlight compress), filmic highlight and filmic shadows, saturation, or some vignette and LUT or glow and bloom? It’s so potential addon, man - You’ve opened new ways to preparing renders in blender:)

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Well the full potential of an addon like this, would be to have the entire color management and render settings bound to cameras, or to word it better, have those settings overridable per-camera.
But hey! It’s version 1.0 :wink:

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Wonderfull, a Time and Color Saver.

As you may have noticed, the white balancing is only controlling White Levels of the Curves in the Color Management. Anything that can be done with curves is doable:

  • Contrast should be pretty easy. You do have different contrasts available to you in the Look menu, although I have to admit they are not very flexible, and not per camera (only per scene)

  • As far as I understand, Filmic shadows works like contrast… would have to test it to know what it does exactly.

  • Highlight compress should be doable, although not sure it’s really needed if you use Filmic tonemapping…

  • Saturation can’t be done with curves. Although the same way you can use LUTs for contrasts, we could have different levels of saturation there and control it per camera…

  • LUTs… to be honest I wished there was an easier way to make LUTs for Blender. Exporting Cube files from Resolve is pretty straight forward, but having to convert them to spi3d LUTs is kind of a pain. Because the functionality is already there, you can copy any OCIO LUTs to Blender\2.79\datafiles\colormanagement\filmic and you’re set.

  • Vignette, glow and bloom: these are post effects, easily done in the Compositor as you probably know, but not possible to do in the Viewport with the way Blender works right now. Probably needs C++ features. Hopefully bloom can be added in 2.8 as a post pass as it already exists for Eevee.

Googling about generating spi3d files, I came across this really AMAZING tool: http://cameramanben.github.io/LUTCalc/LUTCalc/index.html
Oh god, this is so perfect.

Nice work ! Thx !

Great work. Thanks

This is really nice to work with.

Thanks! I noticed that the AF-C would not work if the Photographer panel was turned off, so I removed the Panel button entirely. It was just adding complexity for no real reason.

Noticed some errors when turning on and off the addon, this should be fixed now in the latest version. Sorry for the inconvenience.

FYI, the Focus Distance in AF-C doesn’t always update in realtime in the 3D view header, you have to do an action (like mouse click) or move the mouse over it to refresh. But don’t worry, the focus is done properly.
I’m looking for an elegant solution to refresh the UI in a cheap manner.

Very Good! This is what I want.
Thanks you for sharing!