Upon upgrading the Studio’s engine version to 5.6 the default top-down orthographic camera output is rotated 90 degrees to the right. Where North was originally up, North is now right. The world partition map remains unaffected by this, nor do the other ortho cameras. This also occurs on a fresh install of Unreal Engine 5.6.
As seen in the pictures below, the sphere is to the North as outlined by the world partition map, but when in Top Down view, the sphere’s location is rotated.
We are unable to take efficient screenshots of our game or edit the world in top-down view, as we could in 5.5, due to this issue.
We have attempted to look for a solution in the Editor Preferences or Project settings, but no solution exists for rotating the camera. This is impacting the entire team that utilizes this view.
We are seeking insight from Epic in finding a solution to reorient the top-down orthographic view from the current layout, where north is right, to a 5.5 layout where north is up.
I believe this change is by design and was introduced in the 5.6 preview, commit here for reference.
As far as I am aware, there isn’t any way exposed to the user, i.e. editor/project settings or CVar, to modify this behaviour.
If your team is using a source build of the engine, the most robust way to go about reverting to the older behaviour would be to back out the above-linked commit. Otherwise, the next best thing without engine changes would be to add your own orthographic “Top” camera to your level, configure it to be the correct orientation for you, and pin its view in your Editor UI. Though I will admit this doesn’t hold a candle to the legitimate orthographic view mode, and is quite a weak workaround.
The decision to switch the orientation of the orthographic viewports was intentional and motivated by an initiative to align the systems and conventions Unreal Editor uses with other commonly used DCC tools. We do not plan on supporting the old behavior/orientation of the orthographic viewports. If you find inconsistencies in other areas of Unreal Editor which are still using the old orientation and need updating to the new orientation, please let us know so that we can address them in a future release.
Having just upgraded to 5.6 this change also caught our team by surprise (not in a good way).
World Partition shows positive XY in the bottom-right… it is very unintuitive that this now no longer matches the top view (showing positive XY in upper-right).
However, if the “fix” here is to rotate the world partition view to match, that would cause further confusion for our team!
Hi Hayden - can you provide more detail on the motivation behind this change? It seems like a relatively minor change that has an outsized impact on the workflow of our developers, so it would be good to understand why it was made so we can make the right decision with regards to potentially reverting to the old behaviour.
Any updates on this? My teams work in the AEC industry and north is up. Always. Could we please have a way to adjust this? I will create my own camera for now, but I am curious what industry prefers the camera oriented this way.