Instrument types
Instruments are the "probes" in your scene. They gather light and generate the result images. No simulation can be run without an instrument.
You may define multiple instruments, for instance several cameras. The active instrument for the simulation may be chosen in the render settings.
Ideal rectilinear camera
Summary
This instrument is a simple camera model, describing a perfect rectilinear lens with no aberrations, flat front lens, identical principal points and pupils centers. This is the most common camera model used in CG.
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Real rectilinear camera
Summary
This instrument is a rectilinear lens camera model, with optical aberrations. It provides similar images than the ideal rectilinear camera, with extra lens imperfections. If aberration parameters are all set to zero, it will provide the same images.
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Spherical camera
Summary
This instrument is a spherical camera featuring equirectangular projection. It may be used for creating HDR environment maps for lighting in Ocean or many other image renderers which use the same environment projection.
Unlike many renderers supporting spherical image renders, this camera model supports depth of field effects.
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Orthographic camera
Summary
This instrument is an orthographic camera featuring orthographic projection. It provides images similar to a standard rectilinear camera placed very far away, with a very long focal length, or to an object-space telecentric lens. This camera is not physically plausible, as it collects only light coming from a single direction, which means the amount of collected light is zero. This is equivalent to a zero aperture object-space telecentric lens. For this reason, the amount of light collected on the sensor is not in lux.s as with real cameras, but in lux.s/sr (equivalent to cd.s/m² or nits.s). This means that this instrument measures luminance directly and can be used as an exact luminance sensor.
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Orthographic rectilinear camera
Light-map
Summary
This instrument collects light reaching a scene geometry. The scene geometry surfaces are mapped to the result image buffer using the geometry's UV coordinates.
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Irradiance perspective view
scene file
Summary
This instrument creates a perspective image of scene irradiance. Results show how much light is incoming over the visible surfaces. Depending on sensor type, the computed value may be scene illuminance (Y), spectral irradiance, etc...
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Irradiance orthographic view
scene file
Summary
This instrument creates an orthographic image of scene irradiance. Results show how much light is incoming over the visible surfaces. Depending on sensor type, the computed value may be scene illuminance (Y), spectral irradiance, etc...
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Material irradiance
Summary
This instrument computes the average irradiance on surfaces for a set of materials
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