Understanding the View Frustum

The word frustum refers to a solid shape that looks like a pyramid with the top cut off parallel to the base. This is the shape of the region that can be seen and rendered by a perspective cameraA component which creates an image of a particular viewpoint in your scene. The output is either drawn to the screen or captured as a texture. More info
See in Glossary. The following thought experiment should help to explain why this is the case.

Imagine holding a straight rod (a broom handle or a pencil, for example) end-on to a camera and then taking a picture. If the rod were held in the centre of the picture, perpendicular to the camera lens, then only its end would be visible as a circle on the picture; all other parts of it would be obscured. If you moved it upward, the lower side would start to become visible but you could hide it again by angling the rod upward. If you continued moving the rod up and angling it further upward, the circular end would eventually reach the top edge of the picture. At this point, any object above the line traced by the rod in world space would not be visible on the picture.

The rod could just as easily be moved and rotated left, right, or down or any combination of horizontal and vertical. The angle of the “hidden” rod simply depends on its distance from the centre of the screen in both axes.

The meaning of this thought experiment is that any point in a camera’s image actually corresponds to a line in world space and only a single point along that line is visible in the image. Everything behind that position on the line is obscured.

The outer edges of the image are defined by the diverging lines that correspond to the corners of the image. If those lines were traced backwards towards the camera, they would all eventually converge at a single point. In Unity, this point is located exactly at the camera’s transform position and is known as the centre of perspective. The angle subtended by the lines converging from the top and bottom centres of the screen at the centre of perspective is called the field of view (often abbreviated to FOV).

As stated above, anything that falls outside the diverging lines at the edges of the image will not be visible to the camera, but there are also two other restrictions on what it will render. The near and far clipping planes are parallel to the camera’s XY plane and each set at a certain distance along its centre line. Anything closer to the camera than the near clipping planeA plane that limits how far or close a camera can see from its current position. A camera’s viewable range is between the far and near clipping planes. See far clipping plane and near clipping plane. More info
See in Glossary and anything farther away than the far clipping planeThe maximum draw distance for a camera. Geometry beyond the plane defined by this value is not rendered. The plane is perpendicular to the camera’s forward (Z) direction.
See in Glossary will not be rendered.

The diverging corner lines of the image along with the two clipping planes define a truncated pyramid - the view frustum.

The far clipping plane and floating point math

Objects, lights, and shadows might flicker if they’re far away. The flickering occurs because distances are too large to calculate positions precisely with floating point math. In each frame, the object, light, or shadow is at a slightly different position, so it moves in and out of the view frustum.

Minimise flickering using one of the following approaches:

• Reduce the far clipping plane distance in the Camera component to avoid the distance of objects becoming too large for precise calculations.
• Make everything in your sceneA Scene contains the environments and menus of your game. Think of each unique Scene file as a unique level. In each Scene, you place your environments, obstacles, and decorations, essentially designing and building your game in pieces. More info
  See in Glossary smaller, to reduce distances across your whole scene.

Unity calculates lights and shadows with the world space position as the reference point, for example 0, 0, 0 in a 3D scene. Flickering occurs when lights and shadows are far away from the world space position. To minimise flickering, you can enable camera-relative culling, so Unity uses the camera position as the relative position for shadow calculations. See Culling settings in Graphics settings.