Weird views

SketchUp
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Very useful thanks

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Thanks for that chart… forgot about that. I had a client 2 years ago where we matched up the best we could VRay rendering with how they do their final building photography. Was a great learning experience.

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Short answer: To stand still in one location and “zoom” you lens wider to see more, hit Z (or get the zoom tool) and hold the SHIFT key while dragging the mouse+left button.

TLDR technical details

I run the risk of being stoned to death for being “grammar police” with some of the stuff I have to say, but with that understood:

  1. What SketchUp reports for focal length is actually wrong, at least if you’re used to 35mm photography and the lenses used for it. At least it’s consistently wrong by a factor of 3:2, and that’s one of the columns my chart @ateliernab posted. For example, when SU says the focal length is 36mm it’s actually the equivalent of a 24mm lens.
  2. SketchUp is a little confused with the use of “Field of View”, which technically isn’t the same thing as Angle of View. AoV is measured like an angle in degrees, while Field of View is measured in units of distance like feet or meters.

Interiors often require ultra-wide angle range of lenses to see everything. A fish eye renders straight lines as curves and SU doesn’t do that. Ultra wides generally render straight lines, but produce distortion that looks worse as you get further from the center of the picture. It actually comes from “playing back” the image under different conditions from capture. If you view a such a picture in such a way that it fills your eye with the same angle of view it was captured with, there’s no distortion. The problem is, you would have to make a very large print and stand really close to it to do that.

I still have to finish recording my 3DBC presentation, but here’s an excerpt on the three basic variables and three means of Zooming in SketchUp:

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