What are your normal CAM settings?

[HeathcliffMontague]

Just curious. Mine are just the TinyCam settings. For normal stuff and for **** Hades yes driving. Anyone still use the default?

[Cinnamon Mistwood]

I lowered the camera a bit from the default, and I have 2 other presets - one for my petite avatar and one for driving.

[cariboustag]

Never.

I edited every single camera preset so it's closer to avatar height and eyeline levels, not sure of the exact numbers but the default cam appears more of a birds eye view nowadays when I accidentally reset it fiddling with stuff. Cannot stand it.

Also I have custom ones for especially small or large avatars, for ease and simplicity.

[Quistess Alpha]

I've been playing with a scripted camera override recently, and have been liking it quite a bit. Keeping your camera at about head level is viable if you have it peer around corners a bit.

https://files.catbox.moe/ljobzs.mkv

Edited July 10, 2022 by Quistess Alpha

[Rolig Loon]

13 minutes ago, Quistess Alpha said:

I've been playing with a scripted camera override recently, and have been liking it quite a bit. Keeping your camera at about head level is viable if you have it peer around corners a bit.

That's lovely, Tessa. I like that you have the freedom to rotate your av around without rotating your camera angle at the same time.  It's a much more fluid way of seeing the world.

[Jenna Huntsman]

I've modified my default camera position to be a more modern Over-the-Shoulder style camera rather than the Linden default mile-high camera (lol).

My position settings:

Debug setting	Value
CameraOffsetRearView	X: -3 Y: -1.65 Z: -0.5
FocusOffsetRearView	X: 3 Y: -1.65 Z: 0.25

I also leave DoF enabled, following my 31mm Lens settings with my aperture (f number) set to 16.

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Jenna_Huntsman/CameraLensPresets

For some extra fun, you can also change CameraPositionSmoothing to say, 2 for smoother movements. (You can go higher, but some people may get motion sickness from doing so)

Edited July 10, 2022 by Jenna Huntsman

[Bree Giffen]

In the zoom controls, ctrl-8, ctrl-9 and ctrl-0, I keep my camera zoomed out by hitting the zoom out ctrl-0 twice. While taking photos, the fish eye effect was just too much when I mouse zoomed into any avatar and heads appeared too large. With the default camera zoomed out by default, avatar heads look smaller and better when mouse zooming in for a photo. 

[Eowyn Southmoor]

For 3rd person view I use some settings suggested by Penny Patton on her website years ago - places the camera lower and flatter - looks more realistic and you can wander through lower height areas more easily.  I'm guessing my settings are quite similar to Jenna's posted above. To be honest though, I probably spend more time in SL in mouselook view anyway.

[Buttacwup Float]

With the ability to save custom cam settings I have quite a few. My normal which is MUCH lower than the default, like others mine are tweaks on the settings Penny Patton did. Settings for driving and flying and a birds eye view at clubs etc where I want to be able to see people chatting. Settings for different photograph angles.

[KT Kingsley]

I'm also using a head-level rear camera, pointing at the back of my head and set so the horizon bisects my screen, far enough back to get my feet in at the bottom of the frame. I also have the camera angle/zoom set pretty wide at 1.3, which works out as something like a 120° field of view. I find this ideal for general wandering around, with other custom presets for situations like swimming, climbing and descending.

[Lindal Kidd]

2 hours ago, Bree Giffen said:

the fish eye effect was just too much when I mouse zoomed into any avatar and heads appeared too large

Fix: Change to a longer focal length. (It's easy to do this with the Phototools in Firestorm, but it's in the Debug Settings somewhere too).

17 hours ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

I also leave DoF enabled, following my 31mm Lens settings with my aperture (f number) set to 16.

I use settings similar to Jenna's for camera position, but I don't do this. Depth of field is great to simulate the appearance of real world photographs, but the human eye is not a camera lens and we don't perceive depth of field. We do have variable focus, but we don't notice other things getting blurred out. Besides, DoF is a huge performance hog, so I only use it when taking pictures.

[Jenna Huntsman]

2 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

but I don't do this. Depth of field is great to simulate the appearance of real world photographs, but the human eye is not a camera lens and we don't perceive depth of field. We do have variable focus, but we don't notice other things getting blurred out. Besides, DoF is a huge performance hog, so I only use it when taking pictures.

Humans definitely do perceive DoF, however our eyes are very good at keeping our central vision in-focus. If you pay attention to your peripheral vision (especially if you're looking at an object close to you), then you can see objects in your peripheral vision are likely out-of-focus (* normal lens rules apply, objects in your peripheral at the same distance (relative to the eye) to the object in focus will also be in focus).

As for performance impact, it's really not bad. SL's DoF isn't photo-accurate in order to be fast enough to be left on, to quote Runitai Linden (graphics engineer) -
 

Quote

erm... it's not a photography tool, you're supposed to be able to leave it on

firestorm has a photography tool built on top of it

but the default settings in the main viewer are supposed to be suitable for general use

Another note regarding it's inaccuracy, again from Runitai -

Quote

it's all fakery and just trying to get a similar near and far focal plane as you'd get from a real lens of a given focal length and f-number

the actual size of the "defocus" isn't physically modelled or anything

Quote

I figured the near/far focal planes were the thing photographers cared about most, and the size of the defocus has/had some rather severe performance implications and visual artifacts

and folks wouldn't care too much if the size of the defocus was off

And finally -

Quote

the biggest performance hit of it now is that it draws all the alpha objects twice

(needs the depth info of the nearest alpha object)

It was also acknowledged that the above performance hit is imperceptible (on most hardware configs) in current viewer versions due to bottlenecks elsewhere. YMMV though.
 

[Ceka Cianci]

If this is the walking around every day settings, mine must be at default, I'm guessing.

Otherwise,I have no idea what mine are.. I'm all over the board zooming in and out all the time..

I just use the buttons in the viewer and move with my keys.

 

[Lindal Kidd]

30 minutes ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

Humans definitely do perceive DoF, however our eyes are very good at keeping our central vision in-focus. If you pay attention to your peripheral vision (especially if you're looking at an object close to you), then you can see objects in your peripheral vision are likely out-of-focus

Yes and no. The human eye certainly is, in terms of the optical physics, a camera, and therefore when something at distance X is in focus, things at other distances are not. But the key point is exactly that "our eyes are very good at keeping our central vision in-focus." Your eye is constantly flitting about, focusing on this object or that. Our brains filter out the actual flitting movement and (usually, unless as you say, we're paying attention) the blurriness of the things we are not specifically focusing our attention on.

To complicate the situation even further, our eyes are doing this when looking at a monitor screen too. If the monitor is showing an image that displays a DoF blur, it appears unnatural, because when the eye flits from the in-focus object to another part of the screen, that part does not come into focus. If, on the other hand, everything on the screen is in focus, the eye can do its normal flitting from one thing to another, and each thing is in focus, as it should be. The other parts of the screen are in focus too, but since our brain is not paying attention to them, they seem to act like objects at different distances in the real world, i.e., the brain ignores them.

This constant changing of focus is one reason that the developers of VR headsets are interested in "foveated rendering"...detecting where the eye is looking, and bringing that part of the image into sharp focus, while letting the rest of the image be of lower resolution. The ability to do that allows a display to have a much higher perceived resolution without the increase in computing resources that would be needed to render the entire image at full resolution.

[Jenna Huntsman]

10 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

If the monitor is showing an image that displays a DoF blur, it appears unnatural, because when the eye flits from the in-focus object to another part of the screen, that part does not come into focus.

That does assume the level of blur being applied is a large amount - note that I did specify the specific DoF settings I use, and noted that I use them with the aperture set to 16 - which amounts to a small amount of softening at objects in the distance, similar to the softening that happens IRL (due to atmosphere conditions, defects in the eye, etc). The settings I'm using make for a more natural image, not a stylistic blur as is seen in most photography (although, will make that style of blur if set to lower aperture values, or zoom in close on an object).