Hi guys,
I’m working on my first game and I’m struggling to solve a perspective problem.
The standard perspective offered by Unity seems to me too much convex and very different from the human sight.
I’m trying to obtain a perspective like the one you can see in the attached screenshot (taken from the game Ghost Pop).
I tried all kind of camera settings, all the sensors of the physical camera and also a couple of plugins but I wasn’t able to reach the same result.
The end of my street (I mean the part at the top of the screen) is always very narrow and the enemies are too little and too distant.
If I zoom in, it becomes a little better but I see a lot less of the environment.
Instead, the perspective you can see in attachment is absolutely perfect to me, all the elements are balanced.
I hope someone could help me.
Many thanks!
P.
Hi @playgrounder this is a great question.
Indeed the standard Unity FOV is indeed quite wide, wider than typical human vision. That’s for a lot of reasons, mainly because it’s easier to get going when you can see more of the world around you and lots of games have really wide FOVs for this reason. Of course that’s just a default and there’s absolutely no reason to use it if you don’t want to. I’m amazed at how many people miss the opportunity to modify their camera’s FOV away from default. Lens FOV imparts so much on the context of the frame and it’s an incredibly powerful tool to underscore whatever creative objectives are at any given moment in your game or cinematic.
Human sight is around 40 degrees on the Unity camera - it’s quite telephoto - but doesn’t feel like it as we can move our eyes around so easily. Often when people want to ‘mimic how humans see’ with the camera FOVs, they’re quite surprised at how telephoto and compressed everything is. You’re absolutely right about seeing less of the environment, that’s what’s going to happen with a ‘normal’ FOV, normal being the term for similar to human FOV.
There’s no plugin or magic here to fix the situation, it’s simply how large a field of view you’d like the camera to see at any moment. The perspective of the image you shared looks a little telephoto to me, the camera is up somewhat high and there’s a bit of optical compression which makes the distant enemies not look too small. I’d guess it’s around 40-50 degrees and it seems to work well as the camera is sufficiently far away. I can see why you like that frame, it looks like it will work well for what’s going on there. Something to consider with normal or more telephoto lenses is that their movement requires extra special care and that reduced FOV will amplify any camera movement jerkiness.
This is all fun stuff to experiment with. One of main reasons we built Cinemachine is to allow devs and artists to experiment with different camera FOVs and easily change them at different times / situations / scenes in the experience. There’s rarely one lens to do everything. Experiement! Try changing lenses based on different moments simply by blending to different cameras. Things will get a little weird if you blend between highly different cameras but give it a try, we built this system to encourage WHAT IF?s
Like in films, I recommend the use of a ‘lens pack’ or a fixed number of FOVs which you use across the entire project. This way, each lens can mean something - use a wide for combat, a telephoto for dialog, a normal lens for something else. Pick a suite of FOVs and stick to them for everything: 21mm, 35mm, 50mm, 85mm are typical lenses but try your own. This way you can develop a lens language for your project.
Have fun, keep us posted.
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