Basic camera settings

Basic settings that specifically apply to cameras are:

• Zoom

• Focus

• Field of view, also known as fov or FoV

• Near and far

To get familiar with these settings, we will briefly examine some basics of 3D computer graphics. We will then look at a demo to get a better understanding of how the settings relate to each other.

The following illustration shows the camera and what it sees. Also notice the pyramid shape, cut off by a far plane and a near plane. The space inside the truncated pyramid is the viewing volume or frustum. The near and far planes are imaginary planes that define the frustum.

Now, let's take a look at how the frustum relates to the viewport sprite in which everything inside the frustum is eventually drawn. Different 3D programs have different ways of setting the viewport. In Papervision3D the viewport is set at the near plane. Therefore, although the viewport is a 2D sprite and the near plane is an imaginary plane perpendicular to the camera...