# How do I achieve the traditional 3/4 perspective of JRPGs using the camera?

first a bit of background. I am primarily a pixel artist, and I tend to work in the 3/4 perspective usually seen in old SNES-era games, like so:

That's something I pixeled up. Now, I'm trying to achieve a similar effect in Blender, to create a pseudo-3d/pseudo-2D pre-rendered look. I could just do it all with traditional 2D tiles, but going the 3D route saves me time when having to reorient stuff for combat-sequences in an isometric projection (think similar to the Breath of Fire series).

When doing that pseudo-isometric view, it works fine. What I want to know though, is how to achieve the 3/4 perspective view in the first image. Right now, I can achieve something like this:

In that, I'm using assets I pixeled up previously, textured onto simple geometries. I've set the camera to orthographic with a scale of 16. The X/Y/Z rotations are 45/0/0. My problem though is that the tiles are turning out rectangular and not perfect squares. In the pixel art, the front of the cabinet is exactly two tiles across and two tiles high. The top of the cabinet is exactly two tiles wide and one tile high. In the render though, it's not lining up perfectly.

Is there a way to set up the camera (or something else, perhaps) to get the perfect squares that I'm looking for?

Thanks in advance for any help, it's most appreciated.

• I think the main problem here stems from the fact that the perspective you want to achieve is not a real 3D projection,and thus is not geometrical possible to achieve directly from a 3D model, I think – Duarte Farrajota Ramos Oct 20 '16 at 3:22
• I don't have the answer, but Duarte may be right : after all, using a camera results in a perspective, whereas what you are looking for is not a perspective but an axonometric (there are no vanishing points and thus all objects within same plane look parallel). – ccamara Oct 20 '16 at 4:39
• Have a look at this – sambler Oct 20 '16 at 11:34
• Ah, interesting, hadn't considered that might be the case. Also, that link is an interesting read, definitely helpful, thanks! – lakan-inocencio Oct 20 '16 at 13:08

You can change the Aspect X under Scene->Dimensions to account for the 45 degree camera rotation. When testing, I found that $$\sqrt{2} \approx 1.4142$$ worked to create perfect squares given your constraints. This way you don't have to modify your actual geometry, just the final output image.