Using GLOrtho to view Side, Front, Top perspectives of a 3D scene

Question

I'm building a game level editing app as part of a university project. In my application I have multiple viewports, a Perspective viewport and three orthographic views all setup to view the same scene.

I've successfuly setup the orthographic views and can translate and scale them to mimic scrolling and zooming. Unfortunately, I'm having one problem - my scene still contains 3 dimensions, so objects viewed in orthographic mode of certain depths are clipped when they fall outside of my clipping volume.

Most 3D authoring tools or level editors allow you to view all objects in orthographic mode regardless of depth.

I guess what I need to do is scale my scene in the appropriate dimension so that all values lie between 1 and -1, is there a straightforward way of going about this? Or is there a different better approach.

Thanks very much for your help, Dan

Answer 1

Why not set your clipping planes to an obscene value, something like 100000.0. I think for the most part you're going to need to find some sort of maximum value. Your modeler can't use a millimeter scale (1 unit = 1mm) if you're modeling a city block.

I think most commercial apps I've seen/worked with just have a user configurable value for the clipping planes that defaults to a large value.