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Orientation Gizmo

OrientationGizmoRenderer draws the world axes in a corner of the screen, turning with the camera, the way Game Studio's space marker shows which way is which in the scene editor. It is screen-space, drawn after the scene and over it, and ignores depth, so it is never buried in the scene's content. It is in the Stride.CommunityToolkit.Rendering.Gizmos namespace, with AddOrientationGizmo; ScreenAnchor in Stride.CommunityToolkit.Rendering.

game.AddOrientationGizmo();

Call it from the Start callback, after the graphics compositor exists. The gizmo follows the first camera of the compositor.

The orientation gizmo in the bottom left corner of the raycast example, with the ground gizmo at the origin for comparison

What it draws

Each axis is an arrow from the centre, a shaft and a cone head in the editor's proportions, with its letter in white just past the tip: red X, green Y, blue Z, the colours of the ground gizmo and of Game Studio. The negative halves are small unlettered discs. Ends pointing away from the camera are drawn first and dimmer, so the three arrows read as a tripod however the camera turns; an arrow pointing straight at or away from the camera is seen end-on, a disc with its letter on it.

Two gizmos

AddGroundGizmo() AddOrientationGizmo()
Lives in The world, at the ground's origin A corner of the screen
Answers Where the origin is, and how big a unit is Which way the camera faces
Hidden by Anything in front of it, or the camera looking away Nothing: it ignores depth and stays in its corner
Letters World text, optional Always, past the arrow tips

Placement and size

AddOrientationGizmo takes the corner or edge as a ScreenAnchor and returns the renderer, whose properties cover the rest. Calling it again returns the same renderer and moves it.

var gizmo = game.AddOrientationGizmo(ScreenAnchor.BottomRight);

gizmo.Size = 48;
gizmo.Opacity = 0.8f;
gizmo.ShowNegativeEnds = false;
Property Default What it does
Anchor BottomLeft The corner or edge the gizmo sits in
Size 40 The length of an arrow, centre to tip, in pixels; the shaft, head and discs follow it in the editor's proportions
Margin 12, 12 The distance from the screen edge to the gizmo's reach
FontSize 12 The size of the axis letters
Opacity 1 The whole gizmo's opacity
AutoScale true The sizes above follow the display scale, so the gizmo is the same physical size on every monitor
ShowLabels true Letters past the arrow tips
ShowNegativeEnds true The negative halves, as smaller discs
XColor, YColor, ZColor Red, green, blue The axis colours
LabelColor White The letters, drawn over a faint shadow

Sizes are in pixels before the display scale. The default bottom left corner is free in the examples: the debug overlay, with the camera help in it, sits top right by default.

Reading it

The gizmo is the camera's rotation, nothing else: moving the camera does not change it, turning it does. With the default 3D camera, X points right and Z towards you, so a scene built along X and Z reads as a plan when the camera looks down and as an elevation when it looks along Z. If a letter is on a disc instead of an arrow, that axis points straight at or away from you.

See also

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