Three.js plane facing away from camera aligned with viewport - three.js

I'm trying to have a plane face away from the camera with same orientation so it's aligned in the viewport.
I have a plane in front of the camera, perfectly aligned to the cameras viewport, and I want to flip it in front of the camera, along the objects Y axis, regardless of camera orientation.
The following will orient my plane to face at the camera and works for any orientation:
target.rotation.copy(camera.rotation);
The following will then flip the plane along the plane's Y axis:
target.rotation.y += Math.PI;
All good so far? Except when the camera rotation has a funky tilt to it, let's say it's looking up and to the left, tilted slightly to the right, the plane's flip is tilted, but not the same way as the camera, leaving me with a plane tilted either to the left or right...
I've tried several things such as:
target.rotation.z -= camera.rotation.z;
Nothing... Thanks for your help.

So the problem I was running into was when the camera was in negative z coordinates. This causes the flip on the Y axis to get messed up.
So basically you would do something like this:
var target = new THREE.Object3D();
//position
target.position.copy(s.camera.position);
target.position.add(THREE.Utils.cameraLookDir(s.camera).multiplyScalar(300));
//rotation
target.rotation.copy(s.camera.rotation);
target.rotation.y += PI;
target.rotation.z = -s.camera.rotation.z;
if (s.camera.position.z < 0) {
target.rotation.z = s.camera.rotation.z;
}
EDIT:
Add the following to appropriate spots in your program.
camera.rotation.eulerOrder = 'XZY';
target.rotation.eulerOrder = 'XZY';
Seems to solve previously encountered tilt issues! (see below)
RESOLVED:
Flipped planes tilted the wrong way in some instances, for example when in negative z coords and also the y rotation is not equal to 0, example: point in space hovering and looking at 0, 0, 0.

This is the solution I was looking for when I found this page (taken from this answer):
mesh.lookAt( camera.position );
The local z-axis of the mesh should then point toward the camera.

Related

three.js: Y-rotation of group, relative to camera

Even after hours of googling, I can't really get my head around this. Maybe somebody here can help me a bit with this.
I basically want to determine the Y-rotation of an object (that is always in the viewport's center), relative to my camera. Imagine the object standing on the center of a record player/turntable, that slowly rotates around its Y axis, and my camera always facing the center of that object while using OrbitControls to change the cam's position around the object. Imagine the camera not moving, but the turntable turning, one revolution equals this Y rotation to be between 0° and 360°.
For example, this Y rotation would be:
0° when cam's position is [x=0, y=0, z=100], or [x=0, y=100, z=200] (the cam's y position doesn't matter, it always looks down/up to the group's center),
45° when cam's position is [x=100, y=0, z=100] or [x=100, y=200, z=100],
90° when cam's position is [x=100, y=0, z=0] or [x=200, y=100, z=0], etc.
Thing is, both of these can have some pretty random positions & rotations in the world coordinate system, so it's not given that the object's position is [x=0, y=0, z=0].
Any ideas? Thanks a lot!
I'm not sure if I'm being helpful, but perhaps Object3D.getWorldQuaternion and Quaternion.angleTo() might help?
something like :
const cameraQuaternion = new THREE.Quaternion();
camera.getWorldQuaternion(cameraQuaternion);
const targetQuaternion = new THREE.Quaternion();
target.getWorldQuaternion(targetQuaternion);
const delta = cameraQuaternion.angleTo(targetQuaternion);
const euler = new THREE.Euler().setFromQuaternion(delta);
console.log(euler.y / Math.PI * 180);

Three.js - change camera POV on click

Some project background:
I have a Sprite particle field that is randomly generated. The camera is located at position 0, 0, 0. The particle field is all around the camera. I'm using Raycaster to be able to select the particle that is clicked on and change it's color. Once clicked I would like the camera to focus on this particle. I'm also attempting to use Tween to glide the particle into view.
I've attempted several different methods and none of them work. They are described here:
A traditional lookAt method that used Raycaster to pick up the intersect point from clicking.
var raycaster = new THREE.Raycaster();
raycaster.setFromCamera(mouse, this.camera);
var intersects = raycaster.intersectObjects( this.starfield.children );
this.camera.lookAt(intersects[0].object.position)
A distanceTo method where the distance between the camera and the intersect coordinates is used to move the camera. This only moves the camera along the z plane. It wont actually change its POV.
var cameraPosition = new THREE.Vector3(this.camera.position.x, this.camera.position.y, this.camera.position.z);
var intersectPosition = new THREE.Vector3(intersects[0].object.position.x, intersects[0].object.position.y , intersects[0].object.position.z );
var zoomPos = intersectPosition.distanceTo( cameraPosition );
const newCameraPosition = cameraPosition.addVectors(this.camera.position, vector.setLength(zoomPos));
I calculated the angle of rotation for each X, Y, and Z axis via tan and cos equations. I then attempted to rotate the camera by those degrees. I even tried converting them to radians to see if that would make a difference with the rotation method. It didnt :(
I don't know what else to do. At this stage I'm completely open to a different approach as long as I get this camera working. I'm very stuck,
any help would be greatly appreciated!
Instead of using
intersects[0].object.position
try using
intersects[0].point
.point is the world space position of the hit.
.objectis the object the triangle belongs to. .object.position is just the origin of that object, in this case the particle system. The particle positions themselves are relative to this origin.

Three.js Orbit Controls in Equirectangular mapped sphere - maintaining position

I have mapped an equirectangular image onto a sphere using three.js, placed the camera in the middle of the sphere, and am using the OrbitControls to handle things like zooming & rotation.
This all works fantastically until I want to programmatically adjust what the camera is looking at (I tween camera.target) which ends up changing, I believe, the position of the camera. The issue here is that afterwards when you rotate, you rotate out of the sphere. What would be the proper way to achieve this only by adjusting camera.rotation and camera.zoom. I'm okay with stripping down the OrbitControls but don't fully understand how the rotation should work and am also open to other optins.
If you are using OrbitControls in the center of a panorama, you should leave controls.target at the origin, and set the camera position close to the origin:
camera.position.set( 0, 0, 1 );
By setting
controls.enablePan = false;
controls.enableZoom = false;
the camera will always remain a distance of 1 from the origin, i.e., on the unit sphere.
Then, to look at ( x, y, z ), you programmatically set the camera's position like so:
camera.position.set( x, y, z, ).normalize().negate();
That way, when the camera looks at the target (the origin), it will automatically be looking at ( x, y, z ), too.
three.js r.85

Bring point to nearest camera position by camera rotation

I have a scene in Three.js (r67) with a camera that is controlled by OrbitControls.
If I now select an arbitrary point (Vector3) in the scene, what would be the best way to bring this point (programmatically) to the nearest camera position just by rotating the camera?
Example Scenario
In the below picture the left side is the starting point. The camera rotates around the green sphere (like OrbitControls) where the center of the camera is the center of the sphere. I now like to automatically rotate the camera around the sphere (doing the minimum amount of moves) so that the red box is nearest to the camera (like on the right side).
Independntly to the method of selecting the point in the scene, there's several understanding to what you mean by "bringing camera just by rotating".
I suppose, You want to rotate the camera in the way, to make the selected point in the center of the screen.
This is simple:
camera.lookAt(your_point_in_scene);
You could do this more complicated. Firstly, find the current pointing vector. By default camera looks in direction Vector(0,0,1). When we rotate it in the same rotation as a camera, we will have camera direction:
var vec = new THREE.Vector3(0,0,1);
vec.applyQuaternion(camera.rotation._quaternion);
Now we must determine angle to rotate our camera, and axis, around which we would rotate.
Axis of rotation could be found as a cross product of camera direction and vector from camera to object. Angel could be extracted from dot product:
var object_dir = object_world_point.clone().sub(camera.position);
var axis = vec.clone().crossProduct(object_dir);
var angle = Math.acos( vec.clone().dot(object_dir) / vec.length() / object_dir.length());
Having angle and axis, we could rotate camera:
camera.rotateOnAxis(axis, angle);
Or, if you want to make it smooth:
// before animation started
var total_rotation = 0,
rotateon,
avel = 0.01; // 0.01 radian per second
if(total_rotation < angle){
rotateon = avel * time_delta;
camera.rotateOnAxis(axis, angle);
total_rotation += rotateon;
}
Well that's not hard Oo
You have a center/target point for the camera. You calculate the difference from the target position to the point position and normalize that vector to the length of the camera-centerpoint-distance (i.e. something like pointdistance.multiplyScalar(cameradistance.length() / pointdistance.length()) ).
And that's it. If I understood your question correctly. All you do is "extend" the point's positioni onto your "camera movement dome" and then you have the ideal new camera position. The camera's rotation is done automatic since you always target the center point.
Aaand if you want to smoothen the camera movement a bit you can just interpolate the angle (not the positions directly) with e.g. an exponential function, whatever you prefer.
Hi Dear please follow this
Independntly to the method of selecting the point in the scene, there's several understanding to what you mean by "bringing camera just by rotating".
I suppose, You want to rotate the camera in the way, to make the selected point in the center of the screen.
This is simple:
camera.lookAt(your_point_in_scene);
You could do this more complicated. Firstly, find the current pointing vector. By default camera looks in direction Vector(0,0,1). When we rotate it in the same rotation as a camera, we will have camera direction:
var vec = new THREE.Vector3(0,0,1);
vec.applyQuaternion(camera.rotation._quaternion);
Now we must determine angle to rotate our camera, and axis, around which we would rotate.
Axis of rotation could be found as a cross product of camera direction and vector from camera to object.
Angle could be extracted from dot product:
var object_dir = object_world_point.clone().sub(camera.position);
var axis = vec.clone().crossProduct(object_dir);
var angle = Math.acos( vec.clone().dot(object_dir) / vec.length() / object_dir.length());

THREE.js checking how close the camera is to a mesh

I have a mesh landscape in THREE.js that the camera points down at, I'd like to maintain a certain distance from that mesh (so if there's peaks in the terrain the camera moves further away).
I thought raycasting would be the correct way to start going about this (by getting the intersection distance) but all the examples I find relate to using mouse co-ordinates; when I try to set the origin as the camera position, and the direction co-ords to be the camera position but with a 0 on the Y axis (so camera up in the air facing down) the intersect results come up empty.
For example, on the render event I have:
t.o.ray.vector = new THREE.Vector3(t.o.camera.position.x, 0, t.o.camera.position.z );
t.o.ray.cast = new THREE.Raycaster(t.o.camera.position,t.o.ray.vector );
t.o.ray.intersect = t.o.ray.cast.intersectObject(object, true);
console.log(t.o.ray.intersect);
This results in an empty array, even when I'm moving the camera, the only way I can seem to get this to work is by using the examples that rely on mouse events.
Any ideas what I'm missing?
I realised it was because that setting 0 as the Y property was not enough. I had assumed that the vector co-ordinate simply helped calculate the direction in which the ray was pointing in, but this doesn't seem to be the case. i.e. -:
t.o.ray.vector = new THREE.Vector3(t.o.camera.position.x, -1000, t.o.camera.position.z );
t.o.ray.vector.normalize();
t.o.ray.cast = new THREE.Raycaster(t.o.camera.position,t.o.ray.vector );
t.o.ray.intersect = t.o.ray.cast.intersectObject(t.Terrain.terrain, true);
Produces the expected results.
What about this approach:
console.log( t.o.camera.position.distanceTo(t.o.vector.position) );

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