---
title: "Camera View"
canonical: "https://documentation.chaos.com/space/APPSDK/132678047/Camera%20View"
format: markdown
---
## **Defining camera position**

One of the first things you'd want to do is control your camera. This is done through the *RenderView* plugin. You will always want to create and setup this plugin, exactly one, in your scenes. (The exception is when you are [Texture Baking ](https://docs-chaos.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/APPSDK/pages/132875601)- then you'd use *BakeView*.)

The main parameters of the *RenderView* plugin are:

- **transform** - (default: identity transformation) A transformation (rotation + translation) which defines where the camera is and how it is rotated. The matrix is in column-major format and you will need to calculate it yourself. You can't set rotation angles as in most 3D software. The default camera orientation with identity matrix is so that +Z is pointing up and +Y is the view direction. If your scene uses +Y for up-axis, you will need to set V-Ray's scene up-axis accordingly - see the topic about Global settings, section on *[SettingsUnitsInfo](https://docs-chaos.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/APPSDK/pages/132743593/Global+Settings#SettingsUnitsInfo)*.
- **fov **- (default: 0.785398 radians) The horizontal field of view in radians.
- **focalDistance** - (default: 1) Focus distance in scene units.
- **clipping** - (default: false) Enable the clipping planes.
- **clipping_near** - (default: 0.0) The near clipping plane
- **clipping_far** - (default: 1e18) The far clipping plane
- **zoom** - (default: 1.0) Zoom factor
- **orthographic **- (default: false) Enable to have orthographic projection instead of perspective.

For advanced camera effects, such as DoF, exposure, distortion, vignetting, etc. you will need to enable the physical camera in addition to *RenderView*. We'll cover these in a [later chapter](https://docs-chaos.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/APPSDK/pages/132743793).

You can get different camera types such as fish-eye etc. by changing *type* in *SettingsCamera*, but we will be detailing this in the chapters on [settings](https://docs-chaos.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/APPSDK/pages/132743593/Global+Settings#CameraPhysical) and the [physical camera](https://docs-chaos.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/APPSDK/pages/132875311).