Oblique projection

How does one show something that’s three dimensionsal — a cube — on a surface that’s effectively two dimensional — a computer screen?

The answer in the case of MillionDollarCu.be was to employ projection. In particular, oblique projection, which means that all lines drawn back from the front plane are half the actual measurement.

“Oblique drawing is also the crudest ‘3D’ drawing method but the easiest to master… Even with ‘forced depth’, oblique drawings look very unconvincing to the eye. For this reason oblique is rarely used by professional designer and engineers.”

— Wikipedia

Oh well. It works for me. Plus I think oblique projection works okay with cubes. For me it probably all harkens back to the 2.5D computer games from the '80s I lusted after as a teen.

Because of its simplicity oblique projection is used exclusively for pictorial purposes rather than for formal, working drawings. In an oblique pictorial drawing, the displayed angles among the axes as well as the foreshortening factors (scale) are arbitrary. The distortion created thereby is usually attenuated by aligning one plane of the imaged object to be parallel with the plane of projection thereby creating a true shape, full-size image of the chosen plane.

— another Wikipedia page

That’s a fairer assessment of it :-)

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