Wondering about FOV

[Roland Melkert]

Width all the POV-Ray exports I'm doing lately I'm wondering about the field of view angle.

Mainly because I changed it to 45 degrees sometime ago and forgot all about it, so when using a clean setup I noticed something weird about the renderings in LDCad, this of-course is the default 75 degree FOV it uses out of the box

So now I'm wondering to change that default to 45 or not.

I also experimented with a simple macro script to help calculate a realistic FOV angle.

Code:

function runFOVCalc()

 local w=tonumber(ldc.dialog.runInput('Width (e.g. in centimeters) of the editing area.'))
 local d=tonumber(ldc.dialog.runInput('Distance (using the same unit as width) between your screen and eyes.'))
 
 local angle=math.ceil(2*math.deg(math.atan(0.5*w/d)))  
 ldc.dialog.runMessage('The optimal FOV angle is about: '..angle)
end

This gives 38 degrees for my setup (36 cm editing area width excluding the bins and source windows left/right from it, at a distance of 53 cm)  which seems low.

I'm I missing something here?


Anyone has some more insights on this

[Niklas Buchmann]

The default FOV for POV-Ray is indeed very wide. In photography terms, it's equal to using a 24mm wide angle lens on a full-frame camera.

I usually use a smaller FOV, around 22 degrees. My reasoning is that with LEGO models, we are used to seeing them from a distance and not getting very close to them, so a wide FOV would look unnatural to us. In the end, it comes down to personal preference or an effect you want to achieve by varying the FOV.

[Philippe Hurbain]

The default FOV for POV-Ray is indeed very wide. In photography terms, it's equal to using a 24mm wide angle lens on a full-frame camera.

I usually use a smaller FOV, around 22 degrees. My reasoning is that with LEGO models, we are used to seeing them from a distance and not getting very close to them, so a wide FOV would look unnatural to us. In the end, it comes down to personal preference or an effect you want to achieve by varying the FOV.

I agree, default LDCad fov is MUCH too large, causing annoying distortions in screen corners. I generally use a fov in the 25..30° range.

[Michael Horvath]

I don't know what FOV I use in POV-Ray, because I use direction, up, and right instead of angle, look_at, and sky.