Real perspective.

Perspective. Science as art.

The words "perspective" and "viewpoint" are synonyms, so, the art or science of perspective does not deal with vanishing points and line drawing, but with understanding the way we see.

It is this aspect of perspective that makes it vital for all artists, designers, and visual thinkers to comprehend its systems. Most art schools no longer teach perspective, and even architects are leaning more and more on computers to generate perspectives for them.

Curvilinear Perspective.

The perspective that we have used since the Renaissance has been perfectly suited to our requirements for nearly 6 centuries. But it is not true to the way that we see.

The following image may show what I mean. Imagine a group of football players lined up before a match. In traditional perspective the tops of their heads would be represented as being on a straight line, as in the first figure. This must be false, as player number 1 is further away than player 8, and must therefore appear smaller. The second image shows a more accurate rendering. Unfortunately there has been no mathematical system available to artists to calculate this kind of true perspective. Now thanks to a remarkable invention by Ryno Swart, for the first time in half a millennium, this has changed.

Radial Perspective (patent pending).

The great artists have always been the ones described as visualisers, those with the gift of drawing form imagination (of course this gift, without skill, can be a hollow blessing). Imaginative artists have always been aware that perspective as we experience it is curved. This is why the great comic artists have always loved to draw superheroes in explosive action, with both anatomy and buildings twisted into unexpected shapes.

Radial perspective (Patent no. 2004/0756) is a system of mathematical measures that is capable of rendering a perspective identical to any camera lens, from fish eye to telephoto, as well as the human eye or even the eyes of birds or insects.

The most spectacular use of the system of radial perspective will in fact be in computer applications, where the computer will now be able to match the vision of the artist or of the camera, creating compelling images of virtual reality demonstrably more convincing than anything to date.

The system of radial perspective is particularly suited to any computer simulation of the subjective camera, in games, such as first person shooters, motor racing and flight simulations, and in film, such as 3D animation and special effects of the "Spy Kids" and "Lord of the Rings" style.

A computer model for the Radial Perspective system is under development. Anybody interested in finding out more about this model is invited to get in touch with Ryno at swartart@iafrica.com

Email: ryno@artistvision.org

Studio: 1 Rocklands Road, Simon's Town, South Africa.

Phone: +27 21 786 3975