Free Five Point Perspective Grid Generator

The five points are the four cardinal directions around the rim of that disk, plus the centre. Look straight ahead and the centre is the direction of your gaze. The four rim points are ninety degrees away from it in each direction: hard left, hard right, straight up, straight down. Everything visible in front of you falls inside the disk.

Two families of arcs do the work. One family carries every line that runs left-to-right in the world: each of those arcs starts at the west vanishing point and ends at the east one. The other carries everything running top-to-bottom, from north to south. Where the two families cross, you have a location.

That the arcs terminate exactly on their vanishing points is worth stating carefully, because approximations are common. This overlay builds each arc as a circle whose centre lies on the perpendicular axis, positioned so that its intersection with the boundary is precisely at the two poles. Work the algebra through and the value at the rim comes out as exactly zero, for every band, at every density. It is a construction, not a fit.

The bands are spaced evenly along the centre axis. At the default of six bands there are thirteen arcs in each family — six either side of the straight middle line — and they cross the axis at exact sevenths of the radius: one seventh, two sevenths, and so on out to six. Where you are looking, the grid is regular. Toward the rim it compresses, which is exactly what happens to the last thirty degrees of a hemispherical field.

Only two lines in the whole construction stay straight: the horizontal through the centre, and the vertical through it. They are the zero cases of the two families. Everything else bends, and the further from the centre, the more.

The spokes are a separate family and serve a different question. Arcs answer where; spokes answer which way. They radiate from the centre point at equal angular intervals — twenty-four spokes puts one every fifteen degrees — and they are drawn fainter than the arcs on purpose, because in most work you want them present without competing.

The historical thread runs through a small number of people. Curvilinear perspective as a formal system is usually credited to Albert Flocon and André Barre, whose La perspective curviligne appeared in 1968 and set out the five-point construction in the form still used. But the observation behind it is far older: Leonardo noted in his notebooks that a wide enough field makes the flat construction untenable, and painters had been quietly curving long verticals in architectural subjects for centuries before anyone wrote the geometry down.

The five point fisheye overlay page covers the drawn tradition, beside the rest of the perspective overlays. Photography arrived at the same place from the other direction. A rectilinear wide-angle lens is engineered to keep straight lines straight, and past a certain angle it can only do that by stretching the corners. A fisheye lens abandons the requirement and maps the hemisphere onto the circle instead. Nikon's 1962 Fisheye-Nikkor is the usual reference point for the type entering general use, and it produced exactly the circular image this grid describes.

Which is why the grid is useful over photographs and not only under drawings. Lay it on a frame shot with a fisheye and it tells you two things immediately: where the optical centre actually sits, which is rarely dead centre in the file, and how closely the lens follows the ideal mapping. Lines in the picture that should follow one of the arc families and do not are the lens's own character.

For drawing, the workflow runs from the middle outward. Establish what is happening at the centre first, because that is the only region where your ordinary sense of straightness still applies. Then follow the arcs out. Trying to start at an edge and work in is how five-point drawings go wrong: you have committed to a curvature before you have decided what the picture is looking at.

The most common practical use is not a full hemisphere at all. It is the ceiling-and-floor problem: an interior where you want both, from a position inside the room, and three-point perspective would need a field of view so wide that the corners tear. Five-point takes it comfortably, and at that field of view the drawing reads as a room rather than as a distortion.

Comic and concept artists use it for a particular kind of shot — the establishing panel taken from ground level in a dense city, or the view from the top of a tower looking down and out at once. Both are cases where the subject genuinely occupies most of a hemisphere, and forcing them into three points produces edges that look wrong even to readers who could not say why.

Skateboard and BMX photography, action sports generally, and virtual-reality content all sit in the same territory. So does anything shot on a 360° camera and then unwrapped: the fisheye circle is the native format, and a grid that matches it is more useful than one that assumes a flat plane.

There is a limit worth naming. Five-point covers a hemisphere. It does not cover a full sphere — you cannot see behind yourself, and the construction does not try. Systems that map the whole sphere exist, and they need more than five points and a different projection. If your subject genuinely wraps all the way round, this is not the grid for it.

A second limit: the projection here is linear along the centre axis, meaning the bands step evenly in radius. Real fisheye lenses come in several mappings — equidistant, equisolid-angle, stereographic and orthographic — and each spaces the same angular steps slightly differently across the radius. For drawing, the linear version is the one that behaves predictably under the hand. For matching a specific lens exactly, you would want its own mapping, and no drawing grid provides that.

The boundary circle can be turned off, and often should be. While you are constructing, it is the frame of the whole system and you want it. Once you are drawing inside it, it is a hard edge that the finished image usually does not have — most fisheye work crops the circle to a rectangle, and the boundary is then a construction line rather than a picture element.

The five vanishing-point markers are similarly a construction aid. They are labelled C, N, E, S and W so that when you are three hours into a drawing and the arcs have got dense, you can still tell which family you are following. Turn them off for export.

Choosing a band count is a judgement about how much structure you need. At three bands there are seven arcs per family, which reads as a light suggestion of curvature. Fourteen gives twenty-nine and reads as a mesh — useful for transferring a specific image, distracting when you are inventing. The default of six is a working middle.

Spoke count deserves the same care. Eight spokes gives forty-five degree divisions, which is enough to orient by. Forty-eight gives seven and a half degrees, which is a protractor. Twenty-four — every fifteen degrees — corresponds to the hour marks on a clock face, which most people can read without counting.

A frequent question is whether five-point and four-point perspective are related. They are, distantly. Four-point, sometimes called cylindrical perspective, curves in one direction only — verticals bend, horizontals stay straight, and the field wraps around you horizontally rather than in every direction. It is the panorama case. Five-point curves in both and is the hemisphere case.

Another is whether you can mix five-point with a conventional construction in the same picture. In principle no, since the two disagree about what a straight line does. In practice artists do it constantly — a five-point background under a three-point foreground object — and it works as long as the transition is masked by the subject. It is a cheat, and knowing it is a cheat is what lets you place it well.

This overlay draws over your own image rather than exporting a fixed template because the position of the centre is the whole decision. Move the grid and you have changed where the picture is looking. Scale it and you have changed the field of view. Both of those need to be judged against the actual subject, not against a blank sheet. Where the field of view is narrow enough for straight lines, the three point perspective generator is the construction to use instead.

Everything happens in your browser. The photograph you load is never uploaded, because there is no server for it to go to — the drawing, the transform and the export all run on your own machine. That is a structural property of how the tool is built rather than a policy we could change later.