Camera Mapping is a neat technique to fake 3D out of a photograph. It’s already been used in the game industry for awhile to give life to illustration and 2D game assets. The technique itself is fairly simple, but mastering it requires a special set of skills that are more about art and sense of motion than CG modelling.

Video editors are putting in a lot of effort to get their productions to become more “rich”. This is often achieved with perfectionism applied to a video sequence. This is where Camera Mapping has its strengths. Even if the freedom of movement is limited to a few degrees, that small range of slight movements are all about the nuances. Recently we were able to see a wide and excellent use of camera mapping based technique in 3D Animation derived from 2D illustration. For example, the TVCM of the social game Bahamut developed by Cygames is definitely state of the art of their kind.

Another use, which bring us back to the common use of Camera Mapping, is architecture visualization using panoramic and zoom shots. New CG software is based on physical rendering and can transport real camera settings along with fake special lens effects from specific makers. This makes all the CG pipeline much easier as the time consuming trial and error of setting perspective is cut down drastically by a corrective lens option.