Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> > You specify in some way that you want this, rather than it being the default
> > behaviour.
>
>   I'd want it the other way: If you want to use a different camera aspect
> ratio you have to specify it. By default the camera aspect ratio should be
> preserved.

Me, I cast my vote for the default-to-square-pixels approach.

>   Have you taken into account that someone rendering someone else's scene
> using an aspect ratio different than what the original author intended
> might end up with an image which either clips out parts of the original
> image or, worse, shows undermodeled parts which were not meant to be seen?

This argument is a bit short-sighted: The same could be said about rendering an
image at a much higher resolution than originally intended by the author -
which may get you "undermodeled" parts *everywhere*.

Furthermore, an author cannot pass on his scene's source code and at the same
hide those undermodeled parts from curious eyes - just a few changes to the
camera block will reveal them anyway.


Even so, as some previous poster mentioned, a possible solution to this issue
would be to allow the scene author to specify (in the camera settings) how to
deal with non-matching aspect ratios, by choosing between (e.g.)

  a) adjust horizontal field of view to fit
  b) adjust vertical field of view to fit
  c) enlarge field of view to fit
  d) reduce field of view to fit
  e) distort to fit
  f) enforce aspect ratio

(Option f) could pick a resolution with about the same total number of pixels as
specified on the command-line / ini file, but the ratio chosen by the scene
author.)

If complemented with command-line / ini options to explicitly specify a pixel
aspect ratio, I guess we'd have all aspect ratio issues solved.

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