Understanding perspective
-
I have gone through both classes on perspective, and am confused on one aspect of perspective. I can do one, two and three point perspective, and create a city street in each, but one thing twists my mind to the point of making me go crazy. Here is an example.
How do you get each of these objects at different angles, yet still stay in perspective?
-
@Eric-Castleman This is an example of spherical perspective - it is used very often in comics, or when you want a particularly wide field of view or, on smaller scenes like this one, it can give a special sense of dynamic, danger, dream-ness or weirdness, or a combination of all. It simulates the effect of an extreme wide-angle or fish-eye lens (there is a strong correlation between type of camera lens and the setup of a perspective grid - my world got a lot richer when I understood this!)
In theory, all straight lines become curves in spherical perspective, but when the lines are very short (like here) it can be difficult to see - but you can see the curve clearly in the arrangement of the pile.
Here is an example from Disney ("The hunchback of Notre Dame").
A good book that explains this (actually the only book I know that explains spherical perspective) is "Vaniahing point - Perspective for comics from the ground up" by Cheesman-Meyer. -
@smceccarelli great comment! Does procreate do this sort of grid where it will bend the grid?
-
@Eric-Castleman Ah! That would be nice! Unfortunately all automatic systems I know can only setup straight 1, 2 or 3 point perspective grids. For spherical grids I use a handy device called a "universal grid". I learnt that at school, I have never seen it described in any book. You can google and download a universal grid, it looks like this:
-
I thing what Eric is actually asking is how do boxes move at different angles within a perspective piece (in relation to one another). In other words If you have a group of boxes done in two point perspective, it's pretty easy if they are all going back to the same vanishing points, but once the boxes get shifted around, it's a little trickier.
The way to solve this problem is to KEEP THE HORIZON LINE CONSISTENT, but move where the vanishing points are. I typically just freehand it first to get it looking sort of right, then find the points. This helps it from becoming too stiff. Here's a quick drawing to show two objects in two point perspective that are at different angles.
Hope that helps some. : )
SVS Faculty Instructor
www.leewhiteillustration.com -
@Lee-White thank you!!!!! I can't tell you how hard it has been to figure that out. You're the man!
@smceccarelli though Lee is correct, your input also answered another big question for me. Thanks for being so active on these boards.
