This interactive tool helps you understand and eliminate unwanted parallax by aligning your camera’s rotation center with its optical nodal point — just like CG cameras do by default.
In cinematography, especially for visual effects and stop-motion, the camera must rotate around its entrance pupil (nodal point) to avoid foreground/background shifting. Misalignment introduces parallax — subtle but disastrous when compositing elements across multiple passes or layers.
Most cameras are mounted by the body — placing the tripod head (and pan axis) behind the lens. In stop-motion, this worked fine when cameras were locked off. But once dynamic shots and multi-pass compositing became necessary, this mounting introduced a problem: unwanted parallax. Live-action VFX solved it with nodal rigs and motion control. CG cameras do it automatically. This tool shows you how to do it physically — aligning the lens, not the body, to the pivot point.
You’re learning how to tune a real-world camera to behave like a CG one — rotating around its nodal point instead of the body, and eliminating unwanted parallax. This simple shift preserves consistent perspective, essential for: • Practical compositing • Multiplane shooting • Stereo photography • Integration with CG and VFX Historically, stop-motion avoided these issues by locking the camera in place — a limitation that became part of the art. But modern workflows demand flexibility. This tool helps you move beyond the locked-off era — without abandoning what made it work. You’re not breaking tradition. You’re extending it — with precision.
