Good day to everyone willing to help. I’m currently facing a problem with proportions—or perhaps it’s called something else, I’m not entirely sure.
I’m working on a 3D game that plays like a walking simulator, heavily inspired by Life is Strange 2. I create assets in Blender using real-life proportions and dimensions. However, when I run the game to see how everything looks in the viewport, everything appears super tiny.
For example, an average door is 2 meters in height and 80 cm in width, and my character is 176 cm tall. The camera is positioned behind and slightly to the right of the character, like in similar third-person games.
My question is: why does this happen?
When I compare it to actual games, I’m not sure if those developers use real-life dimensions for their assets or if they scale things up slightly. I don’t have an artistic background, so I never thought about this while playing games. But now that I’m creating one, I’ve noticed that some in-game assets often look small, and it sometimes feels like the characters don’t quite fit into the space—even though they do. Why is that?
Note: My camera uses the CameraAttributesPhysical type. This choice seems pretty good and I think it uses a real-life dimension. Also, I haven’t changed anything in the settings and the FOV is set to 37.8 by default
It does not appear super tiny in your viewport. If you expect the door to be taller, try making it a little taller. I’d be hard-pressed to say based on that angle, that the door isn’t 24 cm taller than the person. I imagine if the door was actually 2 meters and the doorframe was another 20 cm, it would seem more proportional.
Also, the average height of a male adult is 171 cm, and in your comparison screenshot that character model does not look like an average adult.
The character in black was about 1–2 cm taller than 1.75 m, while the second character is exactly 1.75 m. However, the door still feels small in the viewport. IDK why is that, maybe games actuallly make it bigger
Cameras are not eyes are not 3d rendering view frustums.
And you’re not seeing that door the way I see it, as our eyes are not identical (and my left doesn’t see things as my right)
if you’ve respected Blender to Godot scale of I meter per coordinate unit for all your assets then that’s as close as it gets for the field of view of your camera setup.
If your art direction wants to take you in another direction, you can tweak horizontal and vertical field of views on one side, that will affect the perspective lines. On the other, tweaking the size of assets might be more to your taste results wise.
Otherwise, barring unit choice discrepancies, everything is working as advertised.
A lot of your sense of scale comes from field of view and camera positioning. I think you’ll find if you drop the camera a little lower, bring it a little closer, and widen the field of view a bit (maybe 45 degrees?) things will seem bigger.
The brain does weird processing on stuff coming in from the eyes. As an example, look at the moon at night. If it’s up in the sky, it looks small, but it looks much larger if it’s near the horizon. That’s an illusion, and it’s not caused by atmospheric lensing or anything (if it was, you’d expect aspect ratio distortion…), it’s caused by how your brain interprets things. If you roll up a paper tube and look at the moon through it when the moon is near the horizon, it will look as small as it does when it’s high up in the sky. Whether or not the horizon is “in scene” changes the way you perceive size.
With completely synthetic (and mono!) scenes like game renders, your brain can make some very odd choices when interpreting. Playing with position and FOV can mitigate (or take advantage of) that.
I appreciate all the answers I received. I assume I should make my doors and interior slightly larger than usual so they don’t feel too small. I also agree that the camera and FOV position need to be adjusted, and I’ll work on that. Thank you for your help!
Here, door height is more realistic, assuming it is 2.5m and assuming he is 185 cm. But I do not know, maybe it’s just my feeling of perspective, at one time it feels small and large.
