Panels > Look Through Selected

Panels > Look Through Selected >

You can set the Near Clip Plane and Far Clip Plane values for the camera you are looking through.

Near Clip Plane, Far Clip Plane

For Hardware rendering, Vector rendering, and mental ray for Maya rendering, this represents the distance of the near and far clipping planes of perspective or orthographic cameras. The default setting for Near Clip Plane is 0.1 and for Far Clip Plane is 10000.

For Maya Software rendering, by default Auto Render Clip Plane is on (see Auto Render Clip Plane), and the Near Clip Plane and Far Clip Plane values do not determine the position of the clipping planes.

If the distance between the near and far clipping planes is much larger than is required to contain all the objects in the scene, the image quality of some objects may be poor. Set the Near Clip Plane and Far Clip Plane attributes to the lowest and highest respective values that produces the desired result.

Tip

The objects you want to render are usually within a certain range from the camera. Setting the near and far clipping planes just slightly beyond the limits of the objects in the scene can help improve image quality.

NoteThe ratio of far:near clipping planes determines the depth precision. Try to keep that ratio as small as possible for better results.

Since most of the depth precision is concentrated around the near clip plane, try to avoid a lot of detail on distant objects.

This concept is crucial for hardware rendering because it has only 24 bits of depth precision, as opposed to software rendering which has 32 bits.