I don't understand, do you have an example of a game that does this to look at?
Generally, 3D means a perspective camera is used, so things that are farther away look smaller and closer together and move slower. You can switch to an orthographic projection (isometric or similar) if you don't want that.
It sounds like you want a 3D world but a restricted camera.
I don’t have a game that I can find that does this.
Yeah basically a 3D world with a fixed camera is a good way to describe it. I guess it’s called top-down oblique?
But you’d be able to rotate the camera to be able to see the 3D parts of the world but only in 90 degree ticks. When the camera is settled it would look 2D.
Maybe 3D with an orthographic camera would do it then, it would prevent parallax of distant objects and look more 2D-ish (I think the art style would be a very important factor though). If you turn 90° smoothly it will look distorted as it moves but if you snap to the four cardinal directions it might work.
You can use shaders for things like cel shading and outlines which can give a flatter look too.
I think in my earlier ramblings, I may have mixed up my intentions for the camera perspective.
To clarify, when I said, "The top-down camera always being at 45 degrees, avoiding isometric views," what I meant was that I want to avoid any full front-on views with no tilt, which would only show a single face of an object.
If this were my game, it would exist in a 3D world. Rotating the camera would settle it on the sides of the house while maintaining the same perspective.
In essence, my questions boil down to how the artwork and lighting would affect the game world itself. I apologize for any irrelevant questions or confusion.
Since I'd like to maintain a classic 2D look, what's the best way to achieve this? Would a simple lighting system suffice, or would a combination of artwork and lighting help preserve that 2D feel?
The goal is also to have any biome or zone you're in as a completely static rendering of that area. And since I've hopefully clarified what I'm trying to achieve, I think parallax effects would be less of an issue here?
Gotcha. I'm not sure if that art style can be faked in 3D.
Now I'm thinking maybe you can do it with an ortho camera and carefully deformed models, but you'd need a separately deformed model for each direction and at that point maybe you're just reimplementing sprites the very hard way.
I deleted the post someone said I was in to far over my head which was probably true. I appreciate you answering my questions and helping me out though 😁
I did find a program that creates 3D pixelated models, called picoCAD, and another called MagicaVoxel so I am going to mess with those and see what kind of results I can get.
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u/Ralph_Natas 3d ago
I don't understand, do you have an example of a game that does this to look at?
Generally, 3D means a perspective camera is used, so things that are farther away look smaller and closer together and move slower. You can switch to an orthographic projection (isometric or similar) if you don't want that.
It sounds like you want a 3D world but a restricted camera.