The Daz Camera.

[Thomas Fitz-Patrick]

I have no idea if this is useful to anyone, but since I did the work, I might as well share it...

As a (real world) photographer I've always been suspicious of the camera in Daz Studio. The focal length feels off compared to what I'm used to seeing in the viewfinder of an actual camera, so I decided to shoot some tests by setting up a graded 360-degree panorama, 10 meters in diameter, placing the camera in the middle and physically measuring the angle of view in degrees. I then compared it to the calculations on of the AoV calculator found here:

Long story short...
The Daz camera has a default focal length of "65 mm" on a 36mm frame. This turns out to actually translate to a 43.3 mm lens on real 36mm cameras, like the Nikon FX cameras.

Here's a quick guide to some common focal lengths:

REAL 50 mm lens = 75 mm in Daz
REAL 85 mm lens = 127.5 mm in Daz
REAL 24 mm lens = 36 mm in Daz

Basically, if you want a certain focal length, just multiply it by x1.5 in Daz!

[sigstan]

Interesting!

Although mostly I guess we just end up selecting a focal length that looks good in a scene

Only time I think about specific focal lengths in DAZ Studio, is when I'm trying to match a camera to an IBL background. It will look least distorted with a focal length similar to the one used in the original picture shot. For landscapes, this is usually a focal length between 16-35, so that is where I start. Seems I need to expand the range a bit when testing.

Anyway, thanks for the info.

[fuzzy70]

Useful info, I must mention though that angle of view does vary on 3d programs as it does on real cameras. For example a 50mm lens on a 35mm film SLR will give a different angle of view on a budget Digital SLR, pro digital SLR's tend to have a 1:1 ratio with the film equivalents as they have larger CCD sensors, whereas lower end Digital SLR's tend to have smaller CCD's (larger ones cost more to manufacture).

The sensor size in essence decides the angle of view, in the case of 3D programs it is normally related to the render aspect ratio due to the large range of outputs you can do (4:3, 16:9, 16:10 and so forth including whatever you want).

I actually used a few different camera lenses ranging from 50mm-500mm with a small webcam (inbuilt lens removed) for some astrophotograhy tests & obviously the result size wise was nothing like a real camera without changing the focal plane, even then it was different as the aspect ratio of the CCD was not the same as the aspect ratio of 35mm film.

Thanks for sharing your finds as that is useful info

Regards

Lee