Hi all,

is it possible to mix perspective and orthographic projection in OpenGL?

What I have in mind is perspective projection for 3D game objects, and an overlaid orthographic projection for precise drawing of UI elements (e.g. scores, buttons, icons, text, HUD, etc.).

thanks.

Yes, you can change the perspective and modelview matrices at any time and it only affects drawing done afterwards.

Excellent!

Is there any major performance hit for doing this, or can I pretty much do it at will?

thanks for the help.

There shouldn't be any performance hit except in the sense that the more stuff you draw, the slower it'll be!

Don't forget that if you're using Z-buffering, you also need to clear the depth buffer between drawing your perspective stuff and drawing the orthographic overlay, otherwise your GUI elements will get sliced up by the 3D scene.

Quote:Originally posted by NCarter
Don't forget that if you're using Z-buffering, you also need to clear the depth buffer between drawing your perspective stuff and drawing the orthographic overlay, otherwise your GUI elements will get sliced up by the 3D scene.

Some of the old Pangea games suffered from this actually

Anyway, a better thing to do would be just turn off depth testing and do your drawing in the order you want it layered. Clearing the depth buffer has a non-trivial overhead involved. Infact to avoid the overhead of clearing the depth buffer some games do an interesting trick where they use half of the depth range each frame and flip the direction and range in the depth buffer used for the odd frames.

Yep, turning depth testing off is how I got my frames counter up and running. I found the code in a demo named particle.c in the GLUT Examples from the OS X dev CD.

Iceman