5-Point Perspective Grid
Left, right, up, down and straight ahead: the five vanishing points of a 180° view, ready to draw over.
The five points
Take a two-point drawing and widen the view until it needs to show 180°: the left and right vanishing points slide out to the rim of a circle, the verticals gain a zenith and a nadir on the rim above and below, and the depth direction, which in two-point ran off the page, comes back as a fifth vanishing point in the centre. That is five-point perspective: everything in front of you, inside one disc, with five places for straight lines to converge.
The grid opens turned about 20° and tilted a little down, so all five points are visible at once: VP1 and VP2 on the curved horizon, the zenith at the top of the disc, the nadir at the bottom, and the centre point just off the middle. Ground squares of one metre curve away from the centre; the box and the figure, if you switch them on, are drawn to that scale so you can see how a real object sits on the arcs.
The three families of arcs
Every straight line in the scene belongs to one of three families, and each family is a set of arcs between one pair of vanishing points. Depth lines, running away from you, are arcs from the centre point out to the rim. Width lines, running across, are arcs from the left point to the right point, bulging toward the top of the disc above the horizon and toward the bottom below it. Verticals are arcs from the zenith to the nadir, bulging left of the centre on the left side of the picture and right on the right. The one straight line is the one that passes through the centre of the disc, so with the camera level the horizon is straight and everything else curves; tilt the camera and even the horizon bends.
The consequence for drawing is that nothing is parallel to anything. Two windows on the same wall lean toward each other; the floorboards fan out from the centre point and the ceiling joists fan the other way. It looks wrong for about a minute and then looks like a wide-angle photograph, which is what it is.
Drawing over the grid
Place each object by its nearest corner, run its three edges along the three families, and keep the far edges shorter than the near ones exactly as in linear perspective. For the panel, export a transparent PNG at your canvas size and draw over it at low opacity, or use the SVG in a vector app to snap curves to the arcs. The curvilinear perspective lesson walks through a whole room this way. For the same projection at other framings, open the fisheye grid (level, like a lens), the 4-point grid (turned 45°, no centre point) or the 6-point grid (the full sphere).
Questions
What is 5-point perspective?
Curvilinear perspective for a 180° view. Four vanishing points sit on the rim of the circle — left, right, up and down — and the fifth is in the centre, where you are looking. Every straight line in the world becomes an arc through two of them. It is the drawn equivalent of a circular fisheye photograph.
How do I draw in 5-point perspective?
Draw the circle and put a dot at its centre and four on the rim at the compass points. Depth lines are arcs from the centre dot to the rim; width lines are arcs from the left dot to the right dot; verticals are arcs from top to bottom. Place each object by its nearest corner, then run its edges along those three families of arcs. This grid draws the families for you.
5-point vs 6-point: what changes?
Five-point shows the half of the world in front of you, 180°. Six-point continues the same projection round to the full 360°: the sixth point, directly behind you, arrives on the rim and the rim now stands for a single direction rather than a circle of them. Set the angle to 360° or open the 6-point page.
Do artists really use five vanishing points?
Yes, mostly in comics, animation backgrounds and concept art for very wide interiors, dream or underwater sequences, and shots that need the ceiling and the floor in one panel. Many draw only the arcs near the subject and let the rest of the picture stay loose; the grid makes even that quicker.
Is a 5-point grid the same as a fisheye grid?
Same projection. Fisheye is the photographer's word, five-point the illustrator's; the fisheye page opens level and straight on like a lens, this page opens turned and tilted the way the diagram is usually drawn.