A "Render Centerpoint" Offset / Control

    Hello Enscapers,

    I often find myself in the following situation...


    My render/view is all set up, and I like the eye height and perspective of the scene as shown in Enscape.

    However, the extents of the image are capturing too much foreground, and not enough skybox!


    So, I could raise the camera height... but this affects perspective and horizon line...

    I could zoom out, but this also affects the content and feel of the scene, and doesn't change the proportions of foreground to sky.


    What I end up actually doing in these situations is rendering a "Tall" image, that has a larger vertical resolution than I want.

    I then go into photoshop and crop it back down to the desired aspect ratio, while offsetting the image to retain more sky.

    This adds a lot of extra steps and time, especially when doing multiple images, or multiple versions of a scene.


    So... I have buried the lead here, but can we have some sort of render frame offset feature?
    I imagine this is a simple slider or value input that shifts the safe frame so to speak up or down within the scene.


    Thanks!


    Yes! This is the "shift" function of a tilt-shift lens standard to architectural photography. Currently I am capturing square images and cropping in post to achieve the "more sky" you describe. Would prefer to crop in Enscape. Could be a simple slider in the visual settings under the rendering tab that shifts the horizon down (or up if needed).


    have you tried the two point perspective? it allows you to pan the image up and down, and still keep vertical lines distortion free. Or am i missing the real problem here?

    Quote from Herbo

    have you tried the two point perspective? it allows you to pan the image up and down, and still keep vertical lines distortion free. Or am i missing the real problem here?

    Missing the problem by a bit, but its sort of a nuanced thing.


    In your proposed situation, the verticals are in fact 100% fine, that is true.

    However, the horizontals are changing constantly, as your horizon line and vanishing points move with the camera.

    What I am looking to achieve, was very well described by Travis D above me.

    It allows you to keep a fixed horizon line, vanishing point, and horizontal field of view while artificially extending or shifting the upper vertical extents of the image.


    While it sounds a little niche, its actually pretty common for my workflow in architectural rendering.

    A typical use case is wanting a 'eye height view' looking straight forward towards a set of doors, etc. While capturing lots of sky and very little pavement in the foreground.

    I'm Still not sure I see the problem. Isn't the whole point that you want your horizon line to go down in the final image, as you add more sky? i've done tonnes of images with the same goal. This is exactly what two point perspective allows, as it keeps all perspective lines the same as you pan your image up and down... also the horisontals ;-) it is basically a tilt shift lens :-) You can then just change the shape of your enscape window to get a different aspect ratio if you desire that. see attached examples:


    horisontal image, no shift:


    horisontal image, shifted up:


    Vertical image, no shift:


    Vertical image, shifted up:


    Overlay of the last two images to show perspective lines are exactly the same!:

    Travis D - are you finding the new update challenging to achieve this now? This was my go to but it seems that with the new update changing the aspect to a square crops from the width rather than adding to the scene vertically.

    Quote from petramatar

    Travis D - are you finding the new update challenging to achieve this now? This was my go to but it seems that with the new update changing the aspect to a square crops from the width rather than adding to the scene vertically.

    Again, just do as i've describet above. Change the enscape window to the aspect ratio you want (and select a resolution that roughly matches this), Select two point perspective and pan the image up as you please. No need to do multiple renders or anything else :-)

    Hi Herbo, thanks for the replies. I'm having some troubles following your steps. In Sketchup I have selected the two-point perspective mode, panned the image so that the horizon is lower down on the picture plane, and synchronized my view for Enscape with two-point perspective mode on in the visual settings. The horizon in Enscape is still in the center of the picture plane, even though it's shifted down in Sketchup and the view sync is on. Your suggestion to pan up in Enscape doesn't seem to be working as it's move the camera rather than tilt-shifting the horizon. In a tilt shift camera you simply twist the dial (hence the suggestion for a slider in software) - so when I pan I'm slightly moving the camera left or right so this isn't right either since that would be like moving your tripod.

    Using the pixel ratio cropping method I'm able to get the right view, but it requires planning ahead. In order to finish with an image like this I have to know my final image dimensions (1500x2250px in this case) I need to capture an image that is 1500x4500px so that the crop will have horizon 1/4 up from the bottom of the picture plane. This is fine, but we could eliminate the cropping step by shifting the horizon down before rendering out the image.

    Of course, you still can't match a panned 2pt Sketchup view to Enscape, as somehow the panning doesn't translate properly. Like Herbo says using Enscape 2pt setting in the Enscape window allows me to "tilt-shift" my image like any typical architectural image. If you want to save the image position, you can capture the view as an Sketchup scene, but it will show up in Sketchup as a regular 3pt view, pointed way up towards the sky.