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This work reports two projection methods for the calculation of shadowing and blocking in the surrounding heliostat field of a Solar Tower Plant. The first one is the classical parallel projection which is widely used in the literature. The second one is the oblique projection which has been barely addressed in the literature. For the same solar altitude, the frames of two adjacent heliostats are not parallel in reality, and consequently, the projection of the shadowing and blocking areas is not parallel. Compared with raytracing methods, these two projection methods have been developed to reduce the computational cost without affecting efficiency accuracy. Therefore, they are suitable for heliostat field optimization. We have chosen a case study presented by Collado1, that used parallel projection in the calculations. Differences between parallel and oblique approaches are shown. Shading and blocking factors by the more accurate oblique projection are compared with the parallel one. The maximum difference is 0.09% and 1.44%, respectively for parallel and oblique projection in calculating the shading and blocking factor of a circular field of 4550 heliostats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]