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Perspective 1 (Basics)
Guide info
Short: 4-6 minutes
- Summary
• Forms are 3D objects bound by 2D shapes. These shapes make it easier to understand how the 3D form projects onto a flat 2D screen.
• Complex forms can be simplified into a combination of simpler, basic forms.
• Perspective is how forms and their shapes appear when seen from different viewpoints.
• The horizon line is the boundary between the sky and the ground.
• A vanishing point is where a set of lines parallel to each other converge.
1: Form
Shapes are 2D objects bounded by lines. Forms are 3D objects bounded by shapes. Just as shapes can be made with lines and curves, forms are made by combining shapes together. The most common shapes used are quadrilaterals (four-sided shapes), ellipses, and triangles.
The basic forms that are important to remember are cubes, spheres, and cylinders. These basic forms can be warped or stretched to make new forms, like rectangular prisms (cuboids). They can also be cut into parts or subtracted to make other forms such as pyramids and cones. Finally, forms can add together. By adding and subtracting the basic forms from each other, you can create almost any complex 3D object.
It is very useful to study real-life objects to see how these forms get combined in practice.
2: Essence of Perspective
Perspective is how forms change shape depending on your viewpoint. From one angle, for example, a box will appear as a square; however, from another it will resemble two trapezoids or three parallelograms. An example is shown below.
In addition, the further a form is from your position (the camera’s position), the smaller it will appear, shown below. Once a form is very distant, it will start to look like a shape again. This will be elaborated on in future guides.
Perspective is ultimately an illusion created by your brain. The brain is used to 3D spaces, so it will naturally perceive the 2D shapes as three dimensional to complete that illusion. With the addition of light and color, you can communicate the illusion even better, but those are discussions for later guides.
With that, let’s discuss the main concepts for perspective.
3: Basics
The horizon line and the vanishing point are crucial concepts to grasp for a good understanding of perspective. They are a way to organize forms in relation to each other and in relation to space.
The horizon line marks where the ground and sky meet. It helps describe where in the scene you are looking (i.e. if youre looking up from a low point, down from a high point, etc).
This is the most important thing you must know about perspective when working with it. Even if you’re making a scene that does not make much use of vanishing points, you must still use the horizon line to communicate where the viewer is looking. Here are two examples of different horizon lines and how they work in practice.
A horizon line below the scene’s center can communicate you’re on the ground, looking ahead of you. An example is shown below.
On the other hand, a horizon line above the vertical midpoint can give the impression of being high in the sky, looking downwards. An example is shown below.
In perspective, if you extend all the parallel lines from a form, they will eventually converge at a point. This is called a vanishing point, and is useful for actually making forms. You can pick out a few vanishing points to orient a form accurately.
Note that vanishing points need not strictly be on the horizon line, although they often are.
You may have heard of one, two, and three point perspectives, where there are one, two, or three vanishing points in space respectively. This is a suitable framework for understanding the basics, but is technically incomplete. You can have an unlimited number of vanishing points depending on how you rotate forms.
If a vanishing point is infinitely far away all lines that converge at it will look parallel. You can see this in the vanishing point example above, where the parallel vertical lines of the cube indicate that a vanishing point is infinitely far above you.
If you recall the example from earlier with the three differently oriented cubes, the first cube looks like a square because two of the vanishing points are infinitely far away. The second cube looks like two trapezoids because one vanishing point is infinitely far away, and the third cube looks like a full box because none of the vanishing points are infinitely far away.
If your view of an object is mostly aligned with its face, use one vanishing point. If it is aligned with an edge, use two points, and if aligned with a corner use three points for that object.
This is important for you to understand when it comes to rotating forms in space, where you’ll get multiple vanishing points.
The example below shows how rotated forms look in 2-point perspective. Rotating the form makes two new vanishing points, both of which are on the horizon. However, one of the new points is offscreen and does not appear in the image.
Sources
Changed the channel name: Perspective 1: Basics
Credits
Created by @KDE and @koma5