I have a scene filled with ~hundred oblong asteroid shaped objects. I want to place a text label under each one so that the label is visible from any camera angle. I billboard the text so that it always faces the camera.
At first, everything looks great by placing text below the 3d object using .translateY. However, as you start to moving around the scene, labels no longer are 'below' the object depending on your camera position. This especially true when you orient using trackballControls.
How can I place text 'below' the object no matter the orientation. Perhaps if I create a 2d bounding box around each object in relation to the camera on each frame - I could then place the text label right below that 2d box.
I'm also concerned that calculating 2d bounding boxes on a hundred 3d objects every frame could get expensive. Thoughts?
screenshots:
At first, text labels appear correctly translated -y below the object
but as you rotate the camera, labels get sideways
flipping the camera all the way around shows the labels upside down
My goal is to have the labels below the objects no matter the camera orientation.
Did you tried to add the Text Labels to the Object?
object.add(Label) instead of scene.add(Label)
I have a demo site here that might help give you source to look at:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31495717/cubemaker/index.html
This site places textual DOM elements at a screen coordinate-based constant distance from a 3D object, styled with CSS, within the render loop, when the mouse pointer is moved over the 3D object.
From the source:
var id_label = document.createElement('div');
id_label.id = INTERSECTED.name;
id_label.style.position = 'absolute';
id_label.style.top = '-10000px';
id_label.style.left = '-10000px';
id_label.innerHTML = '<span class="particle_label">' + INTERSECTED.name + '<br><span class="particle_sublabel">' + INTERSECTED.subname + '</span></span>';
container.appendChild(id_label);
var id_label_rect = id_label.getBoundingClientRect();
id_label.style.top = (screen_object_center.y - 0.85 * (id_label_rect.height / 2)) + 'px';
if (mouse.x < 0)
id_label.style.left = (screen_object_center.x - horizontal_fudge * (screen_object_edge.x - screen_object_center.x)) + 'px';
else {
id_label.style.left = (screen_object_center.x + horizontal_fudge * (screen_object_edge.x - screen_object_center.x) - id_label_rect.width) + 'px';
id_label.style.textAlign = 'right';
}
The DOM element is drawn offscreen and then repositioned based on attributes of its bounding box and the world coordinates of the 3D element it is associated with. When the mouse pointer is moved outside the 3D element bounds, the text label is removed from the DOM.
Since you are always showing your labels, you might modify this to draw the element once in an initialization step, and simply change the top and left style attributes within the render loop.
Related
I'm working on a project on 8th Wall using A-Frame and Three.js.
I'm using a component called "text-geometry" which generates extruded text nicely. But I want the text to be centered, not "flush-left", so I need to move it left by half its rendered width. I'm doing this using a bounding box:
bbox = new THREE.Box3().setFromObject(mesh)
el.object3D.position.x = (bbox.min.x - bbox.max.x) / 2
The problem is that if the text is nested within several levels of a-entities each with its own scale, the centering is incorrect.
So I am crawling up through all nested entities to find the "true scale":
let [trueScale, ee] = [1, el]
while (ee.parentElement) {
const scale = ee.getAttribute('scale')
if (scale) { trueScale *= scale.x }
ee = ee.parentElement
}
This seems inefficient – is there a more elegant way to do this so that my bbox returns the correct width accounting for the 'effective' scale of the text entity?
In Three.js, I have a group of meshes that is loaded from outside with help of FBX loader. The group has six meshes inside. My task is to make this meshes follow pointer when they get hovered. More precisely, I'd like to have a sort of magnetic effect (just like navbar items in this pen, but with meshes in Three.js).
I think, firstly, I have to detect, where currently pointer is, i.e. get position of cursor in world coordinates system, and then translate meshes towards it. But when I try to get the position of cursor, it seems to be wrong.
Having said that, I have two questions:
How to get proper cursor's position relative to the world coordinates?
How to change position of each of the group's meshes so that they get translated against the cursor?
Here is what have I done so far:
Hi everyone.
In Three.js, I have a group of meshes that is loaded from outside with help of FBX loader. The group has six meshes inside. My task is to make this meshes follow pointer when their canvas get hovered. More precisely, I'd like to have a sort of magnetic effect (just like navbar items in this pen, but with meshes of Three.js).
I think, firstly, I have to detect, where currently pointer on canvas is, i.e. get position of cursor in world coordinates system, and then translate meshes towards it. But when I try to get the position of cursor, it seems to be wrong.
Having said that, I have two questions:
How to get proper cursor's position relative to the world coordinates?
How to change position of each of the group's meshes so that they get translated against the cursor?
Here is what have I done so far. Function that translates meshes isn't written yet. Mousemove callback returns pretty big digits, though:
// Load object and play a third-party animation
loader.load("Object_001.fbx", (object) => {
mixer = new THREE.AnimationMixer(object);
const action = mixer.clipAction(object.animations[0]);
action.play();
object.traverse((child) => {
if (child.isMesh) {
child.material.map = texture;
child.material.needsUpdate = true;
}
});
scene.add(object);
});
// log coordinates of the pointer
const mouse = new THREE.Vector3();
const position = new THREE.Vector3();
function onMouseMove(event) {
mouse.set(
(event.clientX / window.innerWidth) * 2 - 1,
-(event.clientY / window.innerHeight) * 2 + 1,
0.5
);
mouse.unproject(camera);
mouse.sub(camera.position).normalize();
const distance = -camera.position.z / mouse.z;
position.copy(camera.position).add(mouse.multiplyScalar(distance));
console.log(position);
}
wrapperElement.addEventListener("mousemove", onMouseMove);
Thanks in advance.
Made a codepen here:
https://codepen.io/cdeep/pen/YzxPPZQ
The cursor only exists in the canvas dom element which is a rendering of the camera view frustum.
The easiest way to make the object follow a mouse is to get the point of intersection of the mouse with another object in the 3d scene and set the object position to the intersection point. The above codepen showcases that.
raycaster.setFromCamera( mouse, camera );
const intersects = raycaster.intersectObjects([ground]);
if(intersects.length) {
const { point } = intersects[0];
cube.position.copy(point.setY(0.5));
}
You could also position it at a fixed distance from the mouse but it looks odd in my opinion:
const distance = 10;
raycaster.setFromCamera( mouse, camera );
const { origin, direction } = raycaster.ray;
cube.position.copy(origin.clone().add(direction.multiplyScalar(distance)));
Documentation for raycaster:
https://threejs.org/docs/index.html?q=ray#api/en/core/Raycaster
Raycasting is used for mouse picking (working out what objects in the
3d space the mouse is over) amongst other things.
I have a sphere model along with html text labels overlayed onto it at fixed positions. How can I hide them when they are behind the object when i am rotating my sphere using orbit controls?
Anyone knows about any references on stackoverflow or any examples which can solve my issue?
See this example how you could do it: http://jsfiddle.net/L0rdzbej/194/
I have put the relevant code in the updateLabelVisibility()-function, it looks like this:
var meshPosition = mesh.getWorldPosition();
var eye = camera.position.clone().sub( meshPosition );
var dot = eye.clone().normalize().dot( meshPosition.normalize() );
//IS TRUE WHEN THE MESH IS OCCLUDED BY THE SPHERE = dot value below 0.0
var ocluded = dot < -0.2;
if ( ocluded ) {
// HIDE LABEL IF CAMERA CANT SEE IT (I.E. WHEN IT IS BEHIND THE GLOBE)
label.style.visibility = "hidden";
}
else {
// DISPLAY LABEL IF MESH IS VISIBLE TO THE CAMERA
label.style.visibility = "visible";
}
Where mesh is the marker where your label is attached to. The dot is basically telling you how far around the sphere it is, within a certain distance of 90 degree. Simply said by values below zero the label is longer visible by going further around the back.
To be fair I based this off some code from: https://zeitgeist-globe.appspot.com/
I am using chrome experiment's globe http://globe.chromeexperiments.com and I would like to click on any color coordinates to show popup but event listener is not being called. can somebody assist me how to do it?
You could try casting a ray from the camera into the scenery and then getting the intercepts. See the docs for rayCaster.
What you would do is create a new rayCaster object, then get the mouse coordinates of the user's screen. You would need to create some kind of "onclick" event on the parent element of the canvas.
Once the event occurs, the rayCaster object has a property which handles our situation, "setFromCamera". However, you need to provide it a list of all of the objects that you are interested in intersecting, that is all of the rectangles.
So you code would look something like this, note that I used jQuery for this:
var rayCaster = new THREE.Raycaster();
var onClickEventHandler = function(e) {
//Save the mouse data as a vector
//width and height pertain to the size of the canvas.
var mousePosition = new THREE.Vector3((e.offsetX / width) * 2 - 1,
-(e.offsetY / height) * 2 + 1,
0.5);
rayCaster.setFromCamera(mousePosition, camera);
//"objects" is the array of meshes that you care about the user intersecting
var intersects = rayCaster.intersectObjects(objects);
}
What is contained inside the "intersects" array is all of the items from the "objects" array which ere intersected by the ray in the order of intersection. You are likely interested in the first element of this array.
I don't know if that globe utility provides a better way of doing it, what I showed is the generic way of selecting an object in the scenery.
In Three.js, is it possible to draw directly to the WebGL area (for a heads-up display or UI elements, for example) the way you could with a regular HTML5 canvas element?
If so, how can you get the context and what drawing commands are available?
If not, is there another way to accomplish this, through other Three.js or WebGL-specific drawing commands that would cooperate with Three.js?
My backup plan is to use HTML divs as overlays, but I think there should be a better solution.
Thanks!
You can't draw directly to the WebGL canvas in the same way you do with with regular canvas. However, there are other methods, e.g.
Draw to a hidden 2D canvas as usual and transfer that to WebGL by using it as a texture to a quad
Draw images using texture mapped quads (e.g. frames of your health box)
Draw paths (and shapes) by putting their vertices to a VBO and draw that with the appropriate polygon type
Draw text by using a bitmap font (basically textured quads) or real geometry (three.js has examples and helpers for this)
Using these usually means setting up a an orthographic camera.
However, all this is quite a bit of work and e.g. drawing text with real geometry can be expensive. If you can make do with HTML divs with CSS styling, you should use them as it's very quick to set up. Also, drawing over the WebGL canvas, perhaps using transparency, should be a strong hint to the browser to GPU accelerate its div drawing if it doesn't already accelerate everything.
Also remember that you can achieve quite much with CSS3, e.g. rounded corners, alpha transparency, even 3d perspective transformations as demonstrated by Anton's link in the question's comment.
I had exactly the same issue. I was trying to create a HUD (Head-up display) without DOM and I ended up creating this solution:
I created a separate scene with orthographic camera.
I created a canvas element and used 2D drawing primitives to render my graphics.
Then I created an plane fitting the whole screen and used 2D canvas element as a texture.
I rendered that secondary scene on top of the original scene
That's how the HUD code looks like:
// We will use 2D canvas element to render our HUD.
var hudCanvas = document.createElement('canvas');
// Again, set dimensions to fit the screen.
hudCanvas.width = width;
hudCanvas.height = height;
// Get 2D context and draw something supercool.
var hudBitmap = hudCanvas.getContext('2d');
hudBitmap.font = "Normal 40px Arial";
hudBitmap.textAlign = 'center';
hudBitmap.fillStyle = "rgba(245,245,245,0.75)";
hudBitmap.fillText('Initializing...', width / 2, height / 2);
// Create the camera and set the viewport to match the screen dimensions.
var cameraHUD = new THREE.OrthographicCamera(-width/2, width/2, height/2, -height/2, 0, 30 );
// Create also a custom scene for HUD.
sceneHUD = new THREE.Scene();
// Create texture from rendered graphics.
var hudTexture = new THREE.Texture(hudCanvas)
hudTexture.needsUpdate = true;
// Create HUD material.
var material = new THREE.MeshBasicMaterial( {map: hudTexture} );
material.transparent = true;
// Create plane to render the HUD. This plane fill the whole screen.
var planeGeometry = new THREE.PlaneGeometry( width, height );
var plane = new THREE.Mesh( planeGeometry, material );
sceneHUD.add( plane );
And that's what I added to my render loop:
// Render HUD on top of the scene.
renderer.render(sceneHUD, cameraHUD);
You can play with the full source code here:
http://codepen.io/jaamo/pen/MaOGZV
And read more about the implementation on my blog:
http://www.evermade.fi/pure-three-js-hud/