I want something like this but having difficulties archiving such, the key here is to keep vertical lines straight vertical.
Provided your camera is at right angles to the ground (x:90, y:0, z can change), your vertical lines should appear as straight. You can then control the perspective by moving the camera, or changing the focal length.
Perspective camera settings also have controls for lens shift; use the vertical one. But yes, the camera must still be horizontal.
What you’re looking for is called an orthographic projection, and it’s described here:
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/editors/3dview/navigate/projections.html
Blender is emulating the behavior of a regular film camera, which also will produce converging lines. Architects use an “old-timey” bellows camera to take pictures of tall buildings, since it allows them to adjust the film-plane and the lens-plane independently, using the so-called Scheimpflug Principle. (That was the man’s name …)
Ouch, no. OPs image clearly indicates converging lines, so there is no orthographic projection desired. He want straight verticals, which is achieved by using a level camera (which can then be shifted to reveal more in the bottom).
Bellows cameras usually are large format, whose strengths are resolve power, and shallow depth of field. Tilt&shift lenses are also available for DSLRs, although most (?) interior shoots (used in sales) will use rectilinear lens only - Blender lenses will always be rectilinear unless fisheye is used. Tilt&shift lenses are quite expensive, you only need shift for tall buildings. Tilt (has to be faked in blender) is for tilting the focal plane; probably fun but a bit limited use I guess.
As you see, it’s not entirely clear to me but it seemed reasonable to suggest it. Vertical lines will converge on a standard camera when you tilt the camera upward. Bellows cameras fix this by adjusting the orientation of the film-plane: the lens-plane and the film-plane are not parallel. (And “strange lenses” for a box camera don’t work nearly as well. Besides, bellows cameras are great fun to play with.)
I know of no corollary for this in a CG render. How would you “fake it” in Blender “by tilting the focal plane?”
Closest thing to get “sort of” the look is using an override material reading an empty as object texture coordinate (say extract its z axis). Position and orientation of the empty dictates the look of this custom depth map. The result is then used in post as a depth map for blurring.
Hard to explain. See screenshots:
Power math node is just to illustrate you can control the falloff in post. As you can see, top of cylinders are in focus, but the focal plane is not parallel to the image plane.
thanks for all the replies, I ended up having a bigger render size and cropping the desired area out of it, dumb but it worked.
Just a visual showing what CarlG suggested about using the shift value, allowing you to tilt up yet still maintain straight vertical lines more or less.
Rendering is a complex process. Better to learn it on youtube practically.