Create an orthographic view

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to correctly align objects to the grid within the 3d viewport.
Here some examples:

If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I currently have to do a lot of juggling to get an object correctly aligned to the grid. Even in a Top View, the grid still doesn’t appear correctly aligned to the object.

For example:
Here an object which must be aligned within a 5x5 grid (I created a 5x5 grid in addition to the original 4x4 grid in Baseplate texture grid 5x5 studs):

As you can see, this way it is very difficult to get the correct alignment within the 5x5 grid.

I try to use Top View:

Even this way, you can’t see the base of the object or the grid to make the correct alignment.

Here the original object inside Blender in the normal 3d view:

And here, the correct solution, the orthogonal view, allowing the correct alignment of the object with the grid.

My suggestion is not necessarily to modify Studio’s entire 3d View engine but to create an additional viewport, an orthographic viewport.

This will greatly help all developers.

82 Likes

Curious, but have you ever thought about changing the FieldOfView property to 0?

This wouldn’t work as it would be distorted and camera movement will be quite awkward.

15 Likes

Having an orthographic view would make a lot of cool possibilities. The closest we can get right now is setting the camera FieldOfView to 1, but that isn’t perfect. That also means that you have to move the camera really far away to see anything, which causes there to be no shadows because shadows only render near the camera. If we had an orthographic camera mode, we could have a perfect “flat” 2d view while keeping the camera near and still having shadows.

Another use case is for item previews in ViewportFrames. Even with camera FieldOfView at 1, there is often a 1 or 2 pixel angle on straight vertical edges (which is really noticeable on low graphics settings where there is no anti-aliasing).

Here is a cool game I found that is 3d but uses an orthographic camera:

9 Likes

Having an orthographic camera would be awesome! I have a minimap generator that needs to raycast millions of times to make an image. If I had an orthographic camera, I could just use Roblox’s render and cut a 15-minute process down to like 2 seconds.

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A more general solution might be some kind of ‘perspective strength’ like this: Camera perspective strength

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Before, I was just thinking about solving the problem of visual alignment between objects.
But from the comments, I realized that the creation of an orthographic view will open new horizons for an unimaginable number of new games!

And come to think of it, as a developer, an orthographic view is not something that difficult to develop, since the entire 3D engine is ready. It’s just a matter of adapting the perspective.

Hey Roblox! :point_left:
Look at this idea with care! :heart_decoration: :+1:

11 Likes

Yes, I have many ideas where I would need this projection.
I don’t see why this isn’t a thing, considering its in just about any graphics api you can think of.

1 Like