Is it what your really seeing?

Perspective is one of the most unique and challenging aspects of building in SL for all types of builders. Be they an artist or architectural style builder, novice or experienced at their trade it’s the one common challenging denominator we all must take a good look at now and then. If you where to Wiki it you find the simple definition of perspective as:
Perspective (from Latin perspicere, to see through) in the graphic arts, such as drawing, is an approximate representation, on a flat surface (such as paper), of an image as it is seen by the eye. The two most characteristic features of perspective are that objects are drawn:
Smaller as their distance from the observer increases
Foreshortened: the size of an object's dimensions along the line of sight are relatively shorter than dimensions across the line of sight

Well since we are in a 3D environment and our collective views are all a little different based on the settings we chose for our personal viewers. Perspective is truly in the eye of the beholder. One of the ways of truly looking at the SL world in a perspective based view is to do the following. Press the Shift - CTRL and then the R key. This will give you what is called the Wireframe view of SL, where all the outlines of the shapes are shown only. (pressing the same keys again restores the regular view of SL) If you follow back from the front of an object out to its distant view point where it all appears to meet, you get a feel for the perspective of the field of view.

This I have found is very helpful when building a large concept build on a small space size, Dusty Canning made a fabulous panorama a few months ago with trains and planes and all sorts of things and the perspective was extremely well done on the build. So for those who do not have the math figured or can't just eye ball it a simple “wireframe” view and a straight edge held along the edge lines of the front of view prims to the vanishing point where they all appear to intersect and you can get a fairly good feel for what the perspective will be from to back and down to up. Once again you must take into account the SL effect when doing perspective in SL, the view point is up and behind your avatar and all things must be built of that sight line if your going to be able to see the build with out camming up and around continuously while in world.
You can also use changes in the visual perspective to make effects that can be dramatic when building, when I have a smaller height building I will sometimes use multiple prims for the upper sections of the build and make small changes on the texture settings as the prims get higher. This gives the illusion of a greater height than what it would be with just a straight texture set on a larger single prim. Simply by adding prims to the face of a prim can give a great perception of depth to any type build you are creating. The use of effects from Trompe-l'œil to forced perspective are as old as art and buildings have been made. So experiment and give your view a new perspective as you build.


Good Building

Nyx