I have been reading Real World Bryce Book, and I am just not clear on what the difference is between grabbing the camera and zooming it in and out or using the field of view settings. Looking at the pictures she provides (pg 80-81) there doesn't seem to be a difference. I have played with it in Bryce also and really can't seem to tell a difference. So with all that said if someone can tell me when it makes a difference and maybe when to use one over the other. Thanks

There are 3 distinct ideas of "enlarging your view" in Bryce: (a) Zoom in/out using the +/- magnifiers (b) Zoom in/out by moving the camera using the camera controls (c) Changing the field of view. Each is fundamentally different. I'll approach them from the perspective of a person standing with a camera in his hand. (a) is like taking a snapshot and then having your film developer enlarge the image. The image is exactly the same, only bigger, and you've cropped away a different portion of it. Incidentally, this is what the pan (hand) tool does as well: it just moves you around on the final picture. (b) is the easiest to understand. When you move the camera in and out using the camera tools, it has the same effect as walking back and forth with the camera. Objects will change positions relative to each other in the picture if you take a "snapshot". The left-right camera controls are similar to this: they move the camera through the scene. Objects can block each other in different ways as you move the camera around. (c) is the most subtle. When you change the focal length of a lens from telephoto to wide-angle or fish-eye, you are changing the field of view. Changing the field of view away from 60 lets more or less of the surrounding world into the picture... and objects tend to become distorted. For a really bizarre effect, render one scene with a FOV at 60 (default) and then render it again at 150 degrees, and look at the sky and ground near the edges of the image. Using a FOV less than 60 tends to make objects appear "flatter", and makes objects at different depths appear to be closer together, because you lose some depth information when you go to a small FOV. By changing the FOV, you're essentially taking a picture which is not the same size as the canvas, and stretching/squishing it so that it fits, instead of cropping it like in (a) above. It's not a uniform stretch/squash, though: objects near the center are squished/stretched less than those near the edges of the picture. Hope this helps. --flick

Wow.. It now makes perfect sense. Thank you very much. That has always been an area of Bryce I just never understood, and now I do. Again thanks.

In Flickerstreak's example above, 'a' is only like enlarging or cropping if you use the + and - magnifiers on a rendered pic, and then hit the render button again. If you use those + and - buttons in the work window, you get another type of 'zoom' that is independent of the FOV control. Combining the two, along with camera movement, can give some very bizarre results. Likewise, using the pan tool in the work window is different to using it on a rendered pic. Add that into the mix and things can get very odd. Believe it or not, this is just three identical square columns in a straight line, each one pointing straight up out of the ground. I love Bryce. :-)