Professor Puzzler's Perspective Processor

When Professor Puzzler is not busy teaching, building games, or writing math problems, one of his hobbies is drawing (and talking about himself in the third person). There are many intersections between math and art; perspective drawing is one of the most obvious.

The calculators here are designed to help artists more quickly work out lengths and distances in perspective drawings. After all, most of us want to spend more time on our actual drawing, and less time on construction lines that we'll have to erase later!

More calculators may be added as time goes on. If you have a suggestion for a perspective calculator, please use the "Ask Professor Puzzler" link at the bottom of the page to make a suggestion.

The Vertical Stacker

The Vertical Stacker allows you to take a rectangular region drawn in perspective and divide it into vertically stacked regions of equal height. This is useful if you want to draw rows of bricks or siding on a house, or horizontal pane dividers in a window, and want to make sure your rows are appropriately sized.

The Horizontal Stacker

The Horizontal Stacker is the opposite of the Vertical Stacker - this calculator assumes you are dividing a rectangular region into a series of equal width regions stacked horizontally. When would you use this? If you were drawing a wall which had wood paneling, and you wanted each panel to be of equal width, if you were drawing a building with equally spaced columns or windows, or if you were drawing vertical pane dividers in a window.

Foreground/Background Half

This calculator allows you to calculate the foreground width of an object if you know its background width, or vice-versa. This is helpful if you need to position both the center and one edge of an object on a perspective plane, and you need to know the position of the other edge. The example used is positioning a window on a wall, when you know where you want its center to be, and you know where you want one edge to be.