Polyptych
Lay out a big perspective sheet — 36″ × 36″ by default — from SEVERAL rigorous perspectives rather than one. Every view is a real construction with its own station point, picture surface and drawing scale, cut to its own frame and drawn from your model by Scribe's hidden-line engine. The picture surface can be a flat plane, a CYLINDER or a SPHERE — panoramas up to a full turn, unrolled at scale — and a frame can be a rectangle, an ellipse, an arch or a diamond, pasted over the views beneath as a collage (covered strokes are cut away, not painted over), beside a plan panel that draws every station and picture plane at scale. Two layout engines work independently: ARRANGE cuts the sheet into a grid, columns, rows, a hero with a band or a cascade, keeping each view's angle of view; PLACE STATIONS walks the eyes along a line, round an orbit, fanned from one point so the edge rays meet exactly, or over a grid — aimed down the path, at a target or at one bearing. The construction reads live off every view: horizon, vanishing and measuring points, the 60° cone, ground line, true-height ruler, a bearing scale on a panorama. Exports one true-size layered SVG and every station as a Rhino named view. Client-side; nothing uploaded.
A round barn with a new wing — a massing with invented dimensions, standing in until you open your own.
The inset the layouts, the arranger and snapping keep clear.
One station point, three panels. The picture plane is folded twice, so the seams meet exactly — straight lines kink at a fold rather than break.
A band along the bottom for the construction plan — every station and picture plane drawn at scale.
Rows × columns of equal frames.
0 butts the frames edge to edge — the fold and stitch condition.
On, a view re-frames (its picture distance scales with its frame). Off, it keeps its scale and the frame crops.
9 frames for 3 views — 6 new views will fill the rest.
Later frames sit on top. An opaque frame cuts away what lies under its outline.
Plan — where they stand
Each dot is a station point; the heavy chord (or arc, for a panorama) is the picture surface its frame spans. Drag the selected dot to move it, the ◆ to turn it and set the plane’s distance. Wheel zooms, dragging empty paper pans, double-click fits.
View 2 — Fold — centre
- 10 3/4″
- 56° × 114°
- 63° — past the 60° cone
- 34 mm lens
- 14 5/8″ above the sheet's bottom
- 1 1/4″ below the horizon
- 12 7/8″ right
- 9″ left
- parallel — verticals stay vertical
SP (1′-5″, -56′-4″) · eye 5′-3″ · bearing 40° · level · PP 43′-1″ at 1/4″ = 1′-0″ · view from 10 3/4″ · 56° across
- The frame reaches past the 60° cone of vision — the construction is exact, but its corners will read stretched.
The sheet
Each view grades its own ink from its nearest line to its farthest.
Sources & methods
Each view is a constructed perspective. A station point (where the eye stands, in plan, at an eye height), a central visual ray, and a picture surface across it at a chosen distance and drawn at a chosen scale. The surface is the one place a perspective is drawn AT scale, so its distance times the scale is the principal distance — how far from the finished print the eye must be for it to be true. Flat, it is the classical picture plane; as a cylinder or a sphere round the eye it is a panorama, unrolled flat: equal angles make equal inches along the horizon, verticals stay straight on the cylinder, and every horizontal family meets twice, half a turn apart.
The lines are Scribe’s. Every view is traced by the same engine as Scribe: feature edges (boundary, crease past the crease angle, silhouettes measured per triangle against the eye), then each edge sampled and a ray cast from the eye at every sample — hidden iff something is hit first. Edges outside a view’s frustum are clipped away before a single ray is spent. A panorama is traced through a fan of flat sub-cameras no wider than 45°, then every span is re-projected onto the unrolled surface a degree of arc at a time. The screen shows a preview trace with rays every 0.10″ (2.5 mm) of sheet; the export re-traces every 0.024″ (0.6 mm).
The construction is computed from the same camera. The horizon is the vanishing line of every level direction; the vanishing points are where the model’s own X, Y and vertical families converge; a measuring point is the VP of the direction bisecting its family and the picture plane, found on the horizon |VP − SP| from its VP (at sheet scale √(PD² + a²), a the VP’s offset from the CV) — lay a true length on the ground line toward the VP, draw to the MP, and it cuts the receding edge at the true foreshortened length. A one-point view’s measuring points are Alberti’s distance points, CV ± PD.
Layout, folds and collage. Frames can be any of four shapes; every clip and every knockout is exact against the outline. Two picture planes at the same distance from one eye meet on the bisector of their directions, so a view folded on at the right shares the seam exactly. A split makes two windows onto ONE drawing. The arranger keeps each view’s angle of view as its frame changes size by scaling the picture distance with the frame. An opaque frame pasted over earlier ones cuts their strokes away inside its outline, so a plotter never draws what is covered; overlay prints both.
Where it stops. Measuring points are drawn for level flat views; the ground line and ruler for level flat views and cylinders. A frame wider than a full turn is left blank past 360°. Curves arrive as the mesh Rhino baked. The demo barn’s dimensions are invented. Nothing is generated by a model, and nothing is uploaded.