Perspective on vs off

HouseOfBreadCrumbs

I'm curious why perspective is off by default. I only use OnShape for simple home projects and I'm not in any trade that would use this kind of software so I don't have any experience to draw from other than my own, and in my experience it's odd and rather unintuitive to view objects without perspective. Is there a reason it's the default? Industry standard practice or something? Again, just curious. Thanks

S1mon

It really depends on the industry. Designers and architects typically want perspective on all the time. Mechanical engineers spend a lot of time in orthographic views. It’s often useful to see parallel lines as parallel, not converging on a vanishing point.

Creo and Solidworks (ME focused) have perspective options, but so many things are buggy and weird in these views. It really seems like the developers and QA turn on the perspective view to see that it exists, and then immediately switch it off again.

Alias and Rhino (ID/architecture focused) use perspective by default for 3D views. A 4-view window set up - 3 ortho, 1 perspective - is common for these as well. 

Onshape doesn’t have the multiple view at the same time options, but perspective does seem more robust and functional.

tim_hess427

I think @S1mon has it spot on. 

As a mechanical engineer, it's important for me to be see, understand, and compare the size, angle, and position of the elements of my model. I also work with a lot of small components and with those, the perspective view can often feel over-exaggerated and distorted, so that it's hard to understand true size and dimension. 

While there can certainly be a lot of overlap in how different tools are used, Onshape is solidly in the "MCAD" or mechanical-CAD territory, where tools like Rhino are used more for product design (emphasis on curves, form, and aesthetics) and things like Sketchup are used more for architecture (emphasis on textures, form, large structures). In both of those use cases, the perspective view is more common, I think. 

EvanReese

I find that perspective is more useful the bigger the object is that you're working on, especially if it's something you want to see the inside of like a house. I'd use the view more if there was a way to change the camera focal length. The default option in Onshape is too extreme for what I'm doing, but I otherwise like working in perspective..

HouseOfBreadCrumbs

I understand; it's more just a preference based on the user and what they are working on and not necessarily an official standard. Thanks for all the comments and insights.