How do I flatten a camera's perspective?

Boingo the Clown

I should know this already, but I have the memory of a goldfish and can't remember.

What field(s) do I change in my camera's parameters to give my perspective a flatter apearance (i.e. like looking through a zoom lens), or an exagerated perspective (i.e. like looking through a fish eye lens)?

DrNewcenstein

Create a Camera (default ones don't work), go to Parameters>Lens

TomCatOliver

Boingo the Clown said:

I should know this already, but I have the memory of a goldfish and can't remember.

What field(s) do I change in my camera's parameters to give my perspective a flatter apearance (i.e. like looking through a zoom lens), or an exagerated perspective (i.e. like looking through a fish eye lens)?

You need to change the focal length. Increasing it will give a zoom lens effect with a compressed/flattened perspective. If you want to keep the same approximate framing that you had with the default camera setting, you'll need to move the camera further away from the subject. To give an exagerated wide angle perspective, decrease the focal length.

Boingo the Clown

Thanks.  I appreciate that.

maureen4486

This highlights a problem with Daz Studio, getting the perspective true-to-life. The perspective on the default focal length of 65mm may work fine for distant objects, but it is way too much for any objects in the foreground.

The attached image is a perfect way to illustrate this issue. The character is posed with the right arm stretched straight out toward the camera and the left arm tucked in close to the body. The camera faces the character straight on, no rotation, centered on the eyes. You can clearly see how wrong the perspective is at the default focal length. The closer hand looks huge compared to the farther one. If you stood in front of the mirror in this same pose, you'd see that your right hand doesn't look much bigger than the left one. At double the focal length, 130mm, it definitely looks better, but the closer hand still appears too big compared to the other one. At 280mm it looks just about right, pretty much matching what I see when I do this in front of the mirror. The right hand looks just a little bigger than the left one. Here's the thing, though. At that focal length, the camera has to be set way back from the subject, which could cause a problem in some situations. Also, if there are other objects in the scene set much farther back, they'll look too big. This issue with perspective can be a real challenge for anyone creating scenes with objects both up close and farther away.

For portraits, I use a focal length of 250 to 300mm. That seems to work okay for full body shots, too. An alternative is to lower the frame width. A frame width of 7.8mm appears to be equivalent to a focal length of 300mm.

What Daz Studio really needs is a setting on perspective, one that will let the user decrease and increase it as desired. It wouldn't resolve the perspective problem if the scene has objects both near and far, but it would sure help for scenes in which all the objects are close. You wouldn't have to fiddle around with focal length and camera postion to get the perspective to look right. Ideally, the perspective control would be set according to how far the subject is from the camera. Enter in the distance between the two, and the perspective would automatically adjust to the right amount. Alas, I should imagine that would be too hard for the programmers to do, but a simple up down slider for perspective should be possible.