I have had problems in the past with Blenders camera clipping on my models that I imported from Wings, etc. Sometimes the models seem out of camera range and to fix it I have had to scale scenes up or down in some cases. In other cases scaling the camera size down worked. The Blender manuals don’t cover some of these issues. I hope that we can discuss some more tips on Blenders camera clipping value settings. I wish that we could see updates in the area of the way Blender handles our scenes in the camera view. If you have anything that you want to add to this thread go for it.
I know that some new folks have had problems with Blenders camera clipping on more complex scenes. The camera setup is important to getting good looking renders.
I know that this is not a big issue in Blender. But it may be worth discussing.
I don’t know everything but this is what I understand about Cameras.
Usually with the Camera selected, I would open the edit buttons, press the ‘ShowLimits’ button and increase the ‘Clip end’ value to include the furthest object in the scene. If you have each 3D window set to the same clip end, you can see exactly as far as the camera can. If certain objects in your scene have missing faces/sections then increase the camera ‘Clip end’ value.
‘Clip start’ can be increased to ‘see through walls’ for example. If you want to render the inside of a room, instead of having to delete a wall, increase the ‘clip start’ value to ‘see through’ the wall.
The ‘Draw size’ value will increase the visual size only of the camera in the 3D window, useful if you have a large scale scene (ie Wings import). This is also useful to see the field of vison the camera has.
‘Show Limits’ button lets you see a representation of the camera’s maximum distance it can render.
‘Show Mist’ button lets you see a representation of the Mist near and far distance settings, set these values in the World buttons.
‘Lens’ value. This sets the zoom level of the camera. The closer to zero you get the wider the field of vison. A fish eye lens effect can be acheived with a lens setting of 10 or less. Higher values will create the same effect as a zoom lens. If you use a lower value you will have to move the camera closer to the objects in your scene, the higher the value the further away you will have to move the camera. The default value of 35 is usually fine for 90% of projects.
I want to add this little tip that I thought of that relates to settings in the overall Blender scene. If you have scaled any objects in your scene collect them all and type Ctrl-A. I have had objects that didn’t seem to fall into the camara range which were fixed after I did this.