Circular fringe projection profilometry (CFPP) is a recently proposed optical three-dimensional (3D) measurement technique. Theoretically, its optimal measurement accuracy should precede that of the conventional fringe projection profilometry. In practice, the measurement accuracy is impacted by many factors, and much research remains to be done in order to make CFPP reach its optimal precision. One of the dominant factors is the zero-phase point. For the usage of the cotangent function, error near the zero-phase point will be significantly amplified. This makes the overall measurement accuracy very low for CFPP with coaxial layout. To address this critical issue, CFPP with off-axis layout (called OCFPP for simplicity) is presented in this paper. The core theory of OCFPP is briefly introduced. The zero-phase point detection problem coming with OCFPP is explained. Then, two methods, one based on a two-dimensional ruler and the other based on plane constraint, are proposed to solve this additional problem. Simulation and experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed zero-phase point detection methods, and convince the advantage of OCFPP. This paper contributes to distinctly improving the 3D measurement capability of CFPP, and lays an indispensible foundation for its practical application.