What exactly does this camara dial do? I've started to adjust focal lengths for my renders like suggested here and discovered this dial and I can't find it's function listed in the manual. Anything important? Jbear

The Hither dial is important in closeups; it controls how close to the lens an object can be without distortion. For instance: your character is holding a glass out toward the camera as if to say "Cheers". As you focus in on the face, with the line of sight being along the exxtended arm, the glass and then the hand will break up into weird cubist fantasies...... unless you adjust the Hither dial. In general, setting Hither to 0 will get everything to show properly. (Actually, I don't know why you'd even want to leave Hither at the default setting; maybe far-distant shots look better that way, but I don't ever need a far-distant shot!)

I always think of some queen or crone saying: "Come Hither," and I stay away.

That's what it does? You'd think they would have documented it somewhere.

Thanks, makes sense. Playing around with it on a sphere didn't seem to do anything as far as I could tell. Something to keep in the back of the mental bit bucket when something goes wrong though. Once again, thanks for the info. Jbear

It's also incredibly useful when animating lots of figures and props together.

HUH? Not sure what ockham meant. Hither is a "z-clipping" control which only functions in preview (not in renders.) With the value at zero, everything from the lens forward is visible. As you increase the value, foreground objects are clipped and made invisble. The higher the value, the greater the distance on the cameras z-axis will be made invisible. Use it to clear foreground stuff out of the way so you can see and work on your background objects. Remember though, it does not function during renders only preview.