[Gardon]

I have a 3D world I would like to use, as well as 3D models of weapons and characters. I would like to project them orthogonally, meaning that distance will not be taken into account when figuring how close they are to the camera. This would be the same as blitting a 2D image to the screen.

How do I go about doing this? I need 3D perspective for landscape, but want the characters the same size every time.

[Jon Alma]

Could you describe what you want a bit more (sorry it's early in the morning and my brain is still in neutral)? I would imagine that what you are after is to project the whole scene orthogonally - you get the 3D effects (objects hidden by other objects, etc) without any scaling - in effect something close to a 'high tech' isometric view with a camera that can be moved.

Alternatively if what you want is a true 3D background] (with scaling) then draw this using a normal perspective setup and then switch to orthogonal projection to draw the characters and objects in the foreground (this is what I do for the user interface elements in my game)

I'm assuming you don't want to have orthogonally projected characters drawn in a true 3D world as the mismatch in scaling would mean that dwarves would gradually turn into giants as they moved into the distance.

Jon.
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Legends from the Lost Realms

[Gardon]

You know those isometric games like Diablo? They looked 3D but they really weren't. I want to make something like that, only the characters will be fully 3D.

I got the idea from a 2.5D game. It was a fully functional 3D terrain, with 2D images blitted onto the screen. He would have 4 views for each object in the game, and would switch between them as the player rotated the camera. It was an awesome game but I wanted to take that idea a step further.

Why not get rid of the 2D image in a 3D terrain/world and just use 3D models? The only problem is that perspective might take away from the quality I'm looking for.

Let me experiment more and get back to you. Perhaps when I have a more functional engine I can come back and tweak it to my standards.

[RedSlash]

In short: you want an isometric view in 3D?

[Hajo]

I think OpenGL support orthographic projection out of the box. Found a brief introduction here:

http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial/opengl_projections.html

[Gardon]

I'm going to take a different approach. This seems to be more trouble than it's worth :P