Quite a while back, I determined that the default focal length for perspective cameras was severely distorting the shape of my faces. I played around with it and found a setting of 90 to be a good choice.

I then promptly ignored changing it for all but a few images.

So, I figured it was time to run some experiments! I need practice choosing the right settings for the camera. The wrong choice can have a major impact on how the face is perceived. As I determined, this is especially true of the ears and muzzle.

There are 3 focal lengths in this comparison: 45, 90, and 180.
90 is my normal standby; it generally give good results .

45 is provided for comparison to how things used to be presented long ago. Actually, it's not quite the default (35 is.) You can imagine how much more distorted the actual default would be! Clearly, the camera default is setup more for full scenes rather than close ups.

180 was just double 90. I actually rather like how it looks. It makes the snout much less prominent. However, depending on the angle, it can make the forehead too large.


The 3 rows are as follows:
Translation Only: Wherein I only moved the camera, via translation, to reframe the figure such that the nose and ears were on the frame borders. The halo, being a simple torus, makes for a rather useful measurement tool; giving a easy reference for determining how each of images perspective changes.

Plus Rotation: Wherein I also rotate the camera, to try to make the halo approximately uniform across all 3 images, using 90 degrees as the baseline. Consistency in the halo helps bring a more accurate comparison of the distorted perspective.

Wireframe: Wherein I provide wireframes of the translation + rotation, because I needed 3 more images to fill up my 9 square template. :P



There is, of course, a lot more than just focal length that affects this. Some of the settings are even ratios of one another. I'll have to play around with it more, but at least I should be a little more conscious of the camera's affect on the image (and thus, even my own impression of whether something feels "wrong" about the model in development.)