← All ideas
  • Published 16 Nov 2023

Dolly zoom to camera settings to help composition and camera effects

Even when this is not a real "camera setting", because it actually is camera changing it's location in local z-axis relative to the camera zoom. It would in my opinion still fit into the camera settings and be helpful for artists to make work easier / faster.

This could be part of an addon or a real Blender feature.

Dolly zoom is an effect where your camera, while you are zooming, is moving toward or away from the subject in a way that the subject stays in same size. By that way it is distorting the perspective in an useful way to help the compositing work. Also, if animated, it will also easily allow doing interesting effects to animations. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_zoom

dolly.jpg

Why? I often find myself in situations, where I want to fix the perspective of my scene, which sometimes if you for example have too open focal lenght, will make the scene look bit wonky.

So what I do is that I change the focal lenght, but then I also have to change the location of the camera to have the scene work again in a similar way it used to work. This setting would allow me to do this job perfectly, fine tune it a lot and also come back to old setting if I for some reason didn't like the new view.

The slider would be used to adjust the sensitivity the camera is using to change it's location in z-axis relative to the focal lenght.

Biggest problem I can think of, is that now the cameras local z-location is part of the camera settings. So I think it would maybe have to be visualized in the viewport somehow. For example with a small "ghost camera" or other indicator that will show the true location. This "ghost camera" should also be in the camera "viewport display" settings as a checkbox, if we don't wanna see it in the viewport.

This is part of the series of camera settings related ideas. First one was a tilt setting to the camera: blender.community/c/rightclickselect/x6zE/

100%

Development Status: Open

Upvote 1 Downvote 0
artturi85
16 Nov 2023

2 Comments

maxime1

While this is an interesting idea, I believe this is a funny idea, almost too funny to be an official feature, more of an addon that could easily be created to some python wizard. You could achieve the desired result through Drivers. I'm sending an imgur that shows the driver settings. "Dolly_Zoom_Intensity" being a custom property you can access in the Camera properties. I find a value of 6 being really cool for Dolly Zoom imgur.com/a/znjP7h7

maxime1

Oh and the driver is used on the focal length of course