Does camera scale affect appearance?

News & General Discussion
1

I’ve been following a game being made in Unity and I’ve noticed one thing. The models (25-50 ft tall mechs) appear very small even though in third person they are right behind the “head”. I know their artist puts a lot of detail into their models, but in game they appear… I’m not sure how to describe it. Small-ish.

I was wondering if there is a difference between camera scale relative to world objects. My intuition tells me this shouldn’t matter but something tells me the game creators are doing something wrong with the scale of their models relative to the camera.

I mean for one thing in Unity one cannot go to an atomic level. At some point you approach zero. If the vertices of the models were further apart perhaps that would trick the eye in to believing these mechs are truly giant. At the same time I don’t think the scale of models matters due to perspective.

Tell me what your thoughts are. Is there a best practice for relative scale? Wasn’t sure where to put this thread.

2

A screen shot would help here.

But no, this really has nothing to do with scale of the models, except relative to everything else. You could define 1 unit = 1 meter, or 1 unit = 1 mm, or 1 unit = 1 km; in theory it wouldn’t matter, as long as you were consistent about it. (In practice it does matter a little bit because Unity uses 32-bit ints for everything, so you’ll run into precision issues if things get more than a few thousand units away from the origin.)

If the mechs look small, it could be that they aren’t modeled as big as you expect relative to the trees, cars, etc. in the environment. Or it could be that they’re fine and you’re just imagining things. :slight_smile:

3

Yea I have no idea what I was thinking, lol

4

Though a narrow lense (small FoV), can make things look macro and combining it with Depth of field and you have a fail safe recipe for “small model scale look”.

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