# Field of view or resolution?

I'm new to CG and I'm building a ray tracer.

I don't quite understand how to set camera parameters and film(pixel plane) parameters.

Say I want to get an image of 400x300 resolution. I can set an fov, and then the distance between the film and camera can be calculated.

If that's true, a high resolution and a "reasonable" fov, e.g 80 degree, will result in a large distance. Does that makes the object small on the final image?

And I feel like people like to determine resolution at first, in order to get an expected image size. To avoid distortion of objects(fish eye), the fov cannot be too large.

So how do I get close look of an object on a high resolution image?

I think the rasterization way is different from ray tracing one since I can project an object into NDC(normalized device coordinate) to make it big, but what about ray tracers?

• There seems to be a lot of questions packed into one here. Consider shortening to only contain one question and it will be more clear how to help you. Sep 18, 2017 at 16:03
• It sounds like you're assuming that "pixels" have some fixed size in your virtual world. So if you double the size of your output image, then the rectangle of your image plane has to get bigger to fit all those pixels, which means it needs to move further away from the camera to maintain the same FoV. Is that accurate? It's more conventional to treat the distance between the image plane and the camera as an arbitrary constant, and the size of the pixels in the world (to the extent that this is even a thing — usually we don't use this) shrinks as we increase the resolution of the output image. Sep 20, 2017 at 2:26
• @DMGregory So you mean I can set a fixed distance and a fixed FOV, and assume that the size of the image plane is therefore fixed. And the resolution is independent from the image plane size. I can understand this, but how to implement it? I mean, in a ray tracer, I don't really have a "rasterization" process, so when I do ray casting, every sample on the image plane is mapped exactly to a pixel on my final image? Sep 20, 2017 at 5:48
• That mapping is your rasterization process. The stride between each ray you fire corresponds to your pixel density (ignoring supersampling or non-uniform sampling for the moment). So for a higher res image, you're tracing more rays, with smaller gaps between them, all other parameters remaining equal. Sep 20, 2017 at 10:36

• Thanks. But if I calculate image size with given distance and FOV, h = 2d*(atan(fov/2)), when FOV decreases, the image size also gets decrease. I even can't see the whole object. And since the image size decreases, the number of pixels also decreases(so number of rays is fewer and samples on the object are fewer), why the object appears more detailed? Sep 19, 2017 at 0:59