# Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Perspective Views

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As you know, the main reason for modeling 3D objects in Blender is to
render images that exhibit the illusion of depth.

Orthographic views are great for building a house, but seriously flawed
when it comes to creating realistic images of the house for use in a
sales brochure. While a builder wants blueprints that are clear and
accurate, a seller wants imagery that\'s aesthetically pleasing, with
the illusion of depth. Blender makes it easy to use tricks like
perspective, surface hiding, shading, and animation to achieve this
illusion.

How does perspective work?

The essence of  is to
represent parallel edges (in a 3D scene) by edges (in the 2D image) that
*are not parallel*. When done correctly, this produces
 (nearby objects are
depicted larger than distant ones) and contributes to the illusion of
depth.

Perspective is challenging to draw by hand, but Blender does it for you,
provided you give it a 3D model of the scene and tell it where to view
the scene from.

If you\'re confident you understand perspective, you can skip the rest
of this module and proceed to
.

## One-point Perspective

!**Figure 1:** 1-Point
Perspective.{width="200"}

Drawing classes teach various kinds of perspective drawing: one-point
perspective, two-point perspective, and three-point perspective. In this
context, the word \"point\" refers to what artists call the *vanishing
point*.

When you\'re looking at a 3D object head-on and it\'s centered in your
view, that is an example of one-point perspective.

Imagine looking down a straight and level set of train tracks. The
tracks appear to converge at a point on the horizon. This is the
.

The image on the right is a 2D image of a cubic lattice or framework.
Like any cube, it has six square faces and twelve straight edges. In the
3D world, four of the edges are parallel to our line-of-sight. They
connect the four corners of the nearest square to the corresponding
corners of the farthest one. Each of these edges is parallel to the
other three.

In the 2D image, those same four edges appear to converge toward a
vanishing point, contributing to the illusion of depth. Since this is
one-point perspective, there is a single point of convergence at the
center of the image. 

## Two-point Perspective

!**Figure 2:** 2-Point
Perspective.{width="200"}

Now the cube is at eye level, and you\'re near one of its edges. Since
you\'re not viewing it face-on, you can\'t draw it realistically using
one-point perspective. The horizontal edges on your left appear to
converge at a point on the horizon to the left of the cube, while those
on the right converge to the right. To illustrate the cube with a good
illusion of depth, you need two vanishing points.


## Three-point Perspective

!3-Point
Perspective.{width="200"}

Now imagine you\'re above the cube near one of its corners. To draw it,
you\'d need three vanishing points, one for each set of parallel edges.

From that perspective, there are no longer any edges which appear
parallel. The four vertical edges, the four left-right edges, and the
four in-out edges each converge toward a different vanishing point.


## Additional Resources

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