Graphics

Wondering what effect the camera CCD height and width actually have on rendering.

When we are done tracking, and go back into our scene to do some work, the perspective camera we've created is way off somewhere, so we:

1. Put the object we want to look at on the origin (0, 0, 0)

2 Manually enter a position for the camera (like 0, 20, 100, 0 pan, tilt, and roll), make sure FOV is reasonable (45 to 60 or so).

Now, if we do that for a non-tracked camera, it works fine, but if we do it for a tracked camera (but tracking is now disabled), it doesn't work - you cannot see the element that is then located at the origin.

I've tracked it down to CCD Width. When you adjust the CCD center ("Offset") in UX VCC, it automatically sets CCD Width to 8.8, and height to 4.950. I've discovered that setting width back to 0 makes the camera view what you would expect it to be.

So I'm wondering what effect the CCD Width/Height actually has on rendering, because that weirdness is also affecting another effect I am doing in the scene. I know if I even change width by a fraction, everything goes way off.

Any insights? I want to now just disable it so that my other effect works.

CCD offset settings in UX is to account for when you mount the lens on the physical camera. Has the lens be remounted or changed as this will affect this setting and it will need recalibrating.
#XPression

Yes, the offset settings - but what effect does CCD width and height have? I understand the offset values are center of zoom shifts, and are really important, but manually setting them (instead of allowing VCC to do it), and keeping the CCD width and height at 0 doesn't seem to negatively affect tracking.

So, some symptoms of the problems we have: while we're tracking, the item is visible on our FB output, and usually in layout, also, but sometimes we just lose it in layout mode, even when we turn tracking off and are just using the scene normally in layout mode. The solution is to reset the CCD width to 0, which makes everything suddenly "normal" again (otherwise the positioning and orientation are completely messed up).

This is a problem for us because, and I'm going to be frank here, after repeatedly asking why we can't just have a reflection shader (you can download DX and OpenGL reflection shaders for free!), I had to hack my own, which relies on taking a "below the floor" camera renderview; the reflection camera is based off the tracked perspective camera (via visual logic), except Y and Tilt are reversed. But when the tracked camera decides it's not going to render correctly in Xpression because CCD width is non-zero, the reflections don't work. I feel like it's some sort of internal bug that really shouldn't have this effect, but there you go.

For the record, shadows would also be a nice addition - I've had to hack those in, too. I feel like if you're going to do AR, you should have shadows and reflections.

EDIT: you won't be able to replicate this problem without tracking - it's a weird problem that just randomly seems to happen while tracking, something internal gets messed up. Setting CCD width to 0 fixes it. However, given any old scene, setting CCD width to non-zero doesn't cause a problem, in and of itself.
#XPression