Scale Issues. Heights, Mass and Cameras

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I'm very into creating realistic simulations in Unity with first person cameras. I find the arbitrary scaling often used creates a big mess. I have read that 1 unit is 1 meter. How is mass measured? If I wanted a human character to behave naturally, then the mass has to be about 75 kilos. How do you set that?

Also, when you scale cameras, it seems to just make them seem shorter or taller in the environment. So the only solution I've found to make the camera render things looking correct scale, is to scale everything up in the environment to match the camera's default size. Example problem. I create a car sim, and if I don't scale the entire environment and cars up to correct "meters" the camera will render them looking small, like toys. It's important for me to have the scale seem real sized.

Answer 1

Answer by DanSuperGP · Feb 05, 2015 at 10:45 PM

Mass is arbitrary. You decide what one unit represents. It could be a KG, Lbs, Tons...

As a general rule you should not have masses that are more than 100 times different than other objects.

As for getting you camera to look the way you like involves tweaking the field of view. Scaling the camera's transform does nothing.

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jpberti · Feb 05, 2015 at 11:03 PM 0

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Thanks Dan for the answer.

I'm also using Oculus's new stereoscopic prefab camera object which can't really be messed with as far as field of view settings. So in that case, I guess I'm stuck with leaving things alone and scaling the environment to match. Any ideas on that? What would you do if you wanted to model planets to a scale that look right to the camera.

I guess mass is a relative thing so as long as all the objects in the scene were massed correctly to each other things would behave correctly?

DanSuperGP · Feb 05, 2015 at 11:13 PM 0

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I think the scale of things in the camera is going to be relative to where you are located relative to them. I'd move the camera closer or farther away.

The reason to keep things scaled to the appropriate size for the unit scale has to do with the way physics treats them.

Yeah.. if you were modeling planets you could decide 1 unit equals one Earth $$anonymous$$ass or something.

Obviously you're going to have problems with the relative mass of the sun in that case.

Scale Issues. Heights, Mass and Cameras

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