How do I accomplish viewing a 2D game board in 3D space?

Question

So I'm making a 2D board game in 3D space and I don't want to use paper2D because I'm not really using sprites.

What I want is to be able to make a grid of cubes positioned such that I can have a camera facing the grid and it will only show the one face of all the cubes. The idea is that to the player it will just look like a 2D board.

The problem I'm having is, If I make a Cube and move it up/down/left/right, the Camera sees more than just one face despite it being manually positioned to be looking head on at the cube.

So then I remembered that I probably want an orthographic view, so I set the camera to that and unfortunately its just wireframe.

So my question is, how do I accomplish this? Does UE5 not support this kind of thing at all?

Answer 1

This may be the same as other reported errors with UE5 ortho camera preview:

...the Orthographic camera seems to be only outputting wireframes in preview mode…I did a verify and a full reinstall and this issue is still here. Further I initiated a camera shake when damage is taken which for SOME reason outputs flashing lights as opposed to JUST a camera shake.

When I switch the camera to perspective and apply damage the Camera shake works as normal.

Some similar problems were reported and verified in UE4, but have yet to be resolved. It was initially reported in April 2014 and reportedly still broken in August 2020.

It's possible someone else will know of & post a workaround; just because I didn't happen to find one doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Theoretically, if the final rendering is fine, you could just put up with it in preview mode & use intermittent release quality builds to judge the visuals. Up voting &/or posting the issue on the forum might help signal to the developers that this is something you would like them to prioritize.