Why do quads face the back viewport?

Questions & Answers
1

Alright, I have Googled my fingers to the bone, searched every Answer, scoured the forums, read the documentation, and perused every external tutorial / article on this subject, and I am not satisfied with my search results. I have finally, after several months, had a nervous breakdown, and I am willing to… Ask… for help.

Why do quads face the back viewport???

When I click GameObject>Create Other>Quad, it will create a Quad that faces away from the Front Viewport.

If I’m in any other 3d program in existance, when the viewport indicator says Front, you are looking at the FRONT of the composition. When you create an object and go the front viewport, the front of that object should face you. This is how it should be.

Yet when I create a Quad, it faces AWAY from me. I have to go into my back viewport in order to see the front of that quad.

Here at work, we have pulled our hair out and adopted a “Quad Must Face Front/ Viewport Front and Back and Obviously Swapped in Unity” philosophy. This just seems unhealthy.

We are exporting items from Max with the x axis rolled forward from -90 to 0. This SEEMS to work, because when I drop the mesh into Unity, and look at it in the Front Viewport, lo and behold, Front faces Front, Back faces Back. Sounds wonderful.

Alas, the programmers like being able to dump the meshes into quads via code. Create a Quad, replace the quad with a mesh yanked from an FBX, and bob’s your uncle. Here’s the funny part- even though the Quad faces AWAY from the front viewport, the swapped mesh will still face front.

Here’s a picture to illustrate my point. It is taken from the Back Viewport, but rotated at a little angle to show depth, and the orientation of the viewport gizmo… It shows several boxes, more or less properly aligned. It shows 2 quads, facing towards the back. The quad on top, notable in it’s green collision box, contains a copy of the box mesh, with it’s front still facing front and it back still facing back.

25541-wrongway.png
25541-wrongway.png851×557 183 KB

I fully expect to be told to try Google, but as I’ve said earlier, I have been at this for quite a while. There is NO documentation on WHY QUADS FACE THE BACK VIEWPORT. If there is, I will apologize for the caps, thank you profusely- probably too much- and I will even post an article about all this on the youtube. I think there’s a lot of people who could use a solid- SOLID- explanation about all this.

I love you guys! Keep rocking!!!

2

quad was supposed to be ready for 2d added in unity 4.3 until that there was only plane

robertbu is right if you need different quad, you can just make editor script or wizard to do that, create 3 vertices, connect them to mesh and set each vertex it’s normal and uv and you have it

3

theProtolith I am not quite sure that you are correct in what you are saying. Unity uses a Left-Handed coordinate system and thus positive X is to the right and Positive z is forward. On the viewport gizmo, the Colored directions for each axis are the positive directions for that axis.

When you create a new Unity project, the Main camera’s original position is facing down the positive Z axis. Thus when you create a quad, that quad is visible because the Normals of the quad are facing the negative z axis. In your case this would technically be facing the front viewport, but would have the same normals as the back viewport.

If you view the textured cube that you have, it is not rotated correctly. The top and bottom are correct, but the front/back, left/right are facing the opposite directions. You can tell by matching the texture to the correct axis directions. Then you will be able to see that the Quad is in fact lined up with the front viewport as you expect it to be.