Why only one FOV angle?

Unity Engine
1

I have an application where I need to increase the horizontal (x axis) FOV independent of the vertical (y axis) FOV, is there a way to do this?

As far as I can find there is only one FOV angle, which seems a little odd to me and I would hope Unity would have not made a mistake like this. How does having only one FOV angle work? Is there a way to work around this so that my FOV is not set to some fixed aspect ratio? Seems sort of an odd limitation.

Thanks in advance.

Blue

2

You can either work with Camera.aspect or use your own projection matrix. (I personally wish this were not the case, and both FOVs were readable and modifiable.)

3

The reason there is only one FOV angle (which is actually the vertical FOV) is that the ratio between the two is the aspect ratio, so if you know the vertical, you can calculate the horizontal, or vice versa. Generally, you wouldn’t want to set the two FOVs independently because the view would appear distorted, squeezed horizontally or vertically, except when the ratio was correct. If you want to use the distortion as a special effect then you can indeed set the projection matrix to make this happen.

4

That’s only true until you modify Camera.aspect, or after you do so, and then call ResetAspect().

You’ll also find it not being true when switching to fullscreen in the webplayer sometimes, if you haven’t accounted for it. Which is a super-annoying detail that hasn’t been automated to my liking yet. 8)

That’s irrelevelent for what I believe is the best argument for a Camera.horizontalFOV property, which is, there is no easy way to decide what horizontal field of view you want! why does vertical get all the glory??? I’m perfectly fine with the companion updating automatically - a “Link” checkbox would be nice. Yes, it adds clutter to the camera, but just settling on one or the other is a weird solution.

Regardless, thanks for helping me a year ago!

5

It when you need to do something that isn’t generally the case where limited options bite you in the butt.

I agree with Jessy, it wouldn’t have been hard to expose a couple of properties and made this more configurable.

Thanks for both of your quick responses.

Blue