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Scene seems to have lens distortion
I have some spherical objects in a scene that, when they move to the edges of my frame, appear elliptical. I know this must have to do with the camera, but I’m driving myself crazy trying to find a way to stop this from happening. I’ve tried changing focal length, sensor size, field of view, etc, and nothing has really been able to solve it. It’s a 16:9 frame.
Is it unavoidable that a sphere will be seem distorted when it’s in the corner of a shot? I can’t imagine that this would be the case.
Has anyone had experience with this issue?
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4 Replies
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Well, I hadn’t really tried everything. Increasing the camera’s focal length and then moving it back in space yields less perspective distortion and my spheres still look spherical when they’re at the edges of the frame. My composition has changed a little, of course, but I accomplished what I was looking to do, at least.
Guess it’s time to take a photography class…
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you were probably framing your camera shot by right-clicking on this icon
rather than right-clicking on this one 
The first one changes the camera focal length rather than actually moving the camera as the second one (Move) does, so the image gets whatever lens distortions will happen at different focal lengths. Take a look at the camera settings as you move the scene around by right-clicking on those icons. -
Hm, no, I wasn’t doing any right-clicking on those icons. Actually, I wasn’t aware that you could change the focal length that way. Good to know.
I’m pretty sure that even with a default camera, if you add a sphere to your scene and move it to the corner of your frame, you get some visible distortion. I had changed some of the camera settings, though. It’s actually an old project that I’m revisiting and converting to 16:9, and the distortion was more evident in the wider aspect ratio.
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it’s definitely true that distortion happens toward the edge of the frame, more so if the focal length is lower, less if it’s higher but you loose depth at the higher lengths too so it’s a trade-off. This link shows some of that in cameras https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_distortion_(photography)
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