Orthographic Projection

[tgaldi]

Hi,

Is there a way to change a camera/view to use an orthographic projection?

Thanks.

[Beau Hollis]

There is not currently an option for orthographic projections in Prepar3D camera definitions. The top down camera and sim director emulates some aspects of an orthographic view by adjusting the camera altitude/location based on zoom, however it still uses a perspective projection for rendering. We do see the utility of true orthographic rendering for object placement or map views. It's something we're considering for the future. If we do add orho project support to cameras, it's use would likely be limited because some of our rendering techniques/features may not work with an orthographic projection.

[tgaldi]

Thanks for the response Beau. My interest would be for placing cameras to view gauges or panels that aren't included in a vehicles instrument or 2d panels.

[Beau Hollis]

The best option for that right now is using the Virtual Cockpit Only view as a starting point and then using cinematographer mode (default toggle: Shift + 5). If you have an xbox controller, cinema mode is mapped for for that and you can slew and zoom the camera using the controller. Then you can save out the result as a custom view. I don't recall if we disable acceleration effects on VC only by default, but you'll want to make sure those are disabled as well. If you want to get the same stretching effect you get from default panel windows, you'll also want to set a fixed field of view. Horizontal and Vertical FOV can be modified in the custom camera UI. Side Angles for off-axis projection can be placed in the camera definition in the sim/aircraft cfg.

When creating custom cameras, you may want to select the global option so that they save into CustomCameras.xml rather than your current scenario, and can be reused in other scenarios. Unfortunately, doing it this way also means they would show up even when using other vehicles. We don't have an automatic way to convert from a custom camera to camera definition, but if you have your customer cameras working well, you can look at the FOV, XYZ, PBH, etc in the custom cameras XML and port those over into a camera definition with it's own GUID inside the sim cfg.