The steps shown here are available in a convenient and easy to use tool called IMVU Studio Toolkit. This tool makes it super simple to add Camera Zone nodes to furniture products!
What Are Camera Zone Nodes?
Ever get frustrated selecting an IMVU product image for your furniture product when the camera is not focused where you want it, or worse, the product is not visible at all? Ever wish you could get the camera to focus on one part of the product? Well it can, through the use of Camera Zone Nodes.
Camera Zone Nodes are nodes that are added to furniture products in your 3d editing application while building your furniture mesh and skeleton. When you import your work in to IMVU Studio and select the IMVU product image in the Info panel, you will have the option to select from the Scene list, ‘Camera Zone‘. This will present a list of product thumbnails using the camera zone nodes you have set up in your 3d editing application.
How They Work
Camera Zone Nodes are actually quite simple. They are a set of up to four nodes with special names. The names are:
- Funiture.Camera.1
- Funiture.Camera.2
- Funiture.Camera.3
- Funiture.Camera.4
When these are added to your scene and your work imported into IMVU Studio the camera that is used to render the thumbnail for Camera Zone images will focus on and ‘keep in view‘ all of the camera zone nodes in the skeleton. This is similar to selecting all of the camera nodes in your 3ds editing application and doing ‘Frame Selected’ (Blender) or ‘Zoom Extends Selected’ (3ds Max).
You do not have to use all four but you will have the most customizable results if you do. For example, using just one camera zone node will result in the camera focused around a single point and zoomed WAY in. It’s not what you want.
How To Set Them Up
Start by creating an ‘Empty‘ ‘Plain Axes‘ or ‘Cube‘ node (in Blender) or ‘Helper‘ ‘Point‘ or ‘Dummy‘ node (in 3ds Max).
They can be placed anywhere in the furniture skeleton below the root bone.
It is also convenient to parent them to a bone to allow you to move them all at once.
The IMVU Studio Toolkit for either Blender or 3ds Max provides one button creation of camera zone nodes in the Furniture Tool.
It also has a helpful ‘Center on Selected’ feature which will center the parent node of the camera zones on what ever you have selected!
Blender Set Up
3ds Max Set Up
