What's the use of plane in this example - three.js

I was looking at demo by Mrdoob on dragging cubes.
http://threejs.org/examples/webgl_interactive_draggablecubes.html
I have understood the basic code to add cubes and some other basic functionality. But i'm not getting what for? PLANE has been used in the code. I am understanding its being used obviously for dragging the cubes somehow, but why hasn't object's TRANSLATION property been used here?
view-source:http://threejs.org/examples/webgl_interactive_draggablecubes.html
And why are we subtracting the PLANE position from offset and then offset from intersects[ 0 ].point

In this example, the plane is being used as something for a ray to intersect, in order to get a position to work with in the scene. If there were nothing to intersect the ray with, there wouldn't be any reliable way to know what the mouse is pointing at.

Related

Three.js: Make raycaster's direction the same as object's

all!
I'm currently making a game in THREE.js and while I've got the 'vertical' collision with the ground sorted with a raycaster, I am having trouble with horizontal collision. I've consulted a few tutorials, but they don't do what I want them to.
Basically, I've got a load of cubes. I've given them a random y-axis rotation and used translate to make them move 'forward' - pretty basic stuff. How do I get a raycaster to point the same direction as the cube, almost like a line sticking out of its 'nose'? i.e. how do I get a raycaster's direction to copy that of an object?
It's been a while since I've been on here, but kind regards anyway,
Matthew

Three JS How to make ray or rays from camera to all object in rederer to check faceIndex

I have some project for child http://kinosura.kiev.ua/sova/ and i need to check faceIndex of all cubes in screen.
Now i use intersections array from mouse, but is working only when user pointer at the cube.
How to make ray or rays from camera to all object to check faceIndex ?
I try to make four rays to cubes but if i set cube.position as origin of like this:
raycaster.setFromCamera( cube1.positoin , camera )
I get empty array of intersections.
I also try to set static 2d vector as origin (get coordinate from mouse) but i have relative renderer size and this coordinate all time change... its not work(
Thanks for answer anyway.
I suggest that you try another approach It appears that your cubes do not cover one another, relative to the camera view. So use the surface normals, and compare them to the view direction to determine if they are facing the camera or facing away from the camera by a simple one-per-polygon dot product.
When you are creating your geometry, before adding it a THREE.Mesh call .generateFaceNormals() on it.
Instead of ray casting, iterate through all faces, grab the surface normal of the face, transform relative to the view (inverse transpose of the object's matrix), then dot(). might sound complicated, at first, but it's actually just a couple of steps and much faster than doing a lot of raycasts (which will probably include this anyway!)

Convert coordinates of a child object to world coordinates

I'm quite new to three.js and lacking some basic understanding of the coordinate systems obviously.
I have an Object3D "group" that has some children (planes). I use "group" to rotate the group of planes, which works fine. Now camera can move and parent object can rotate. One can click on the planes to select them. What I want now is to let the selected plane fly into the camera.
If I just move the plane to the camera position it flys in any direction but mostly not to the camera. Certainly because "group" seems to be the "world" for the child objects. If I move a plane along the z-axis the plane move along the z-axis of the parent.
I don't understand which coordinates I need to take (or transform) to move the plane bound to "group" in front of the camera.
Basically I demoed with three.js what famo.us did, just spent some two hours on it or so. I faked the wanted effect with an additional plane that is not grouped and which I can just move to camera without transformations. The demo is available here:
http://hwg.rattat.net/famo.html.
Would be nice if somebody could tell me how to get this working. I could still live with the fake, when I would be able to place the additional plane exactly over the selected plane.
Thanks in advance,
Christian
The question of converting local coordinates to world coordinates has been addressed at THREE.js: Calculate world space position of a point on an object . There might also be helping information at how to: get the global/world position of a child object .

Getting coordinates of the mouse in relation to 3D space in THREE.js

I have struggled for the past 3 weeks trying to figure this out. If anyone could help me I would appreciate it so much.
I'm developing a game similar to Geometry Wars in where I have a triangle in the middle of the screen which you can move around.
The problem is I need the triangle to rotate and face toward the direction of the mouse curser. I don't need to worry about the z-axis per-say as I always have the camera in a fixed position (z=500) and I am treating the scene as a "2D scene" - all the action occurs on the z=0 plane.
Calculating the angle between the triangle and the mouse is elementary:
targetAngle = Math.atan2(mouseCoord.y-this.position.y, mouseCoord.x-this.position.x)
where this is the mesh.
The problem is that the mouseCoords are in standed Dom window format whilst the position of the triangle is in Three.js format.
Q) How would I convert the mouse coords to represent the coords on the z=0 plane where the triangle is?
I have tryed so many ways including ray intersection but nothing works ;(
Thank you all for your help and thank you so much for an amazing framework!!!!
I don't actually see the problem. use the THREE.vector3 with the z coord in 0. then use something like triangle.rotate(THREE.vector3(targetAngle,0,0) or something
I suspect your intersection isn't working because of a CSS offset by your canvas within the DOM.
If you need the triangle to look at something specific, you should simply be able to use the "lookAt" method of the triangle.
To have it look at the camera for example:
triangleMesh.lookAt(camera.position);

Working with Three.js

Context: trying to take THREE.js and use it to display conic sections.
Method: creating a mesh of vertices and then connect face4's to all of them. Used two faces to produce a front and back side so that when the conic section rotates it won't matter from which angle the camera views it.
Problems encountered: 1. Trying to find a good way to create a intuitive mouse rotation scheme. If you think in spherical coordinates, then it feels like just making up/down change phi and left/right change phi would work. But that requires that you can move the camera. As far as I can tell, there is no way to change actively change the rotation of anything besides the objects. Does anyone know how to change the rotation of the camera or scene? 2. Is there a way to graph functions that is better than creating a mesh? If the mesh has many points then it is too slow, and if the mesh has few points then you cannot easily make out the shape of the conic sections.
Any sort of help would be most excellent.
I'm still starting to learn Three.js, so I'm not sure about the second part of your question.
For the first part, to change the camera, there is a very good way, which could also include zooming and moving the scene: the trackball camera.
For the exact code and how to use it, you can view:
https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/master/examples/webgl_trackballcamera_earth.html
At the botton of this page (http://mrdoob.com/122/Threejs) you can see the example in action (the globe in the third row from the bottom).
There is an orbit control script for the three.js camera.
I'm not sure if I understand the rotation bit. You do want to rotate an object, but you are correct, the rotation is relative.
When you rotate or move your camera, a matrix is calculated for that position/rotation, and it does indeed rotate the scene while keeping the camera static.
This is irrelevant though, because you work in model/world space, and you position your camera in it, the engine takes care of the rotations under the hood.
What you probably want is to set up an object, hook up your rotation with spherical coordinates, and link your camera as a child to this object. The translation along the cameras Z axis relative to the object should mimic your dolly (zoom is FOV change).
You can rotate the camera by changing its position. See the code I pasted here: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/79219/three-js-camera-turning-leftside-right
As others are saying OrbitControls.js is an intuitive way for users to manage the camera.
I tackled many of the same issues when building formulatoy.net. I used Morphing Geometries since I found mapping 3d math functions to a UV surface to require v little code and it allowed an easy way to implement different coordinate systems (Cartesian, spherical, cylindrical).
You could use particles instead of a mesh I suppose but a mesh seems best. The lattice material is not too useful if you're trying to understand a surface mathematically. At this point I'm thinking of drawing my own X,Y lines on the surface (or phi, theta lines etc) to better demonstrate cross-sections.
Hope that helps.
You can use trackball controls by which you can zoom in and out of an object,rotate the object,pan it.In trackball controls you are moving the camera around the object.Object still rotates with respect to the screen or renderer centre (0,0,0).

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