OpenGL simultaneous translate and rotate around local axis - opengl

I am working on an application that has similar functionality to MotionBuilder in its viewport interactions. It has three buttons:
Button 1 rotates the viewport around X and Y depending on X/Y mouse drags.
Button 2 translates the viewport around X and Y depending on X/Y mouse drags.
Button 3 "zooms" the viewport by translating along Z.
The code is simple:
glTranslatef(posX,posY,posZ);
glRotatef(rotX, 1, 0, 0);
glRotatef(rotY, 0, 1, 0);
Now, the problem is that if I translate first, the translation will be correct but the rotation then follows the world axis. I've also tried rotating first:
glRotatef(rotX, 1, 0, 0);
glRotatef(rotY, 0, 1, 0);
glTranslatef(posX,posY,posZ);
^ the rotation works, but the translation works according to world axis.
My question is, how can I do both so I achieve the translation from code snippet one and the rotation from code snippet 2.
EDIT
I drew this rather crude image to illustrate what I mean by world and local rotations/translations. I need the camera to rotate and translate around its local axis.
http://i45.tinypic.com/2lnu3rs.jpg

Ok, the image makes things a bit clearer.
If you were just talking about an object, then your first code snippet would be fine, but for the camera it's quite different.
Since there's technically no object as a 'camera' in opengl, what you're doing when building a camera is just moving everything by the inverse of how you're moving the camera. I.e. you don't move the camera up by +1 on the Y axis, you just move the world by -1 on the y axis, which achieves the same visual effect of having a camera.
Imagine you have a camera at position (Cx, Cy, Cz), and it has x/y rotation angles (CRx, CRy). If this were just a regular object, and not the camera, you would transform this by:
glTranslate(Cx, Cy, Cz);
glRotate(CRx, 1, 0, 0);
glRotate(CRy, 0, 1, 0);
But because this is the camera, we need to do the inverse of this operation instead (we just want to move the world by (-Cx, -Cy, and -Cz) to emulate the moving of a 'camera'. To invert the matrix, you just have to do the opposite of each individual transform, and do them in reverse order.
glRotate(-CRy, 0, 1, 0);
glRotate(-CRx, 1, 0, 0);
glTranslate(-Cx, -Cy, -Cz);
I think this will give you the kind of camera you're mentioning in your image.

I suggest that you bite the apple and implement a camera class that stores the current state of the camera (position, view direction, up vector, right vector) and manipulate that state according to your control scheme. Then you can set up the projection matrix using gluLookAt(). Then, the order of operations becomes unimportant. Here is an example:
Let camPos be the current position of the camera, camView its view direction, camUp the up vector and camRight the right vector.
To translate the camera by moveDelta, simply add moveDelta to camPos. Rotation is a bit more difficult, but if you understand quaternions you'll be able to understand it quickly.
First you need to create a quaternion for each of your two rotations. I assume that your horizontal rotation is always about the positive Z axis (which points at the "ceiling" if you will). Let hQuat be the quaternion representing the horizontal rotation. I further assume that you want to rotate the camera about its right axis for your vertical rotation (creating a pitch effect). For this, you must apply the horizontal rotation to the camera's current angle. The result is the rotation axis for your vertical rotation hQuat. The total rotation quaternion is then rQuat = hQuat * vQuat. Then you apply rQuat to the camera's view direction, up, and right vectors.
Quat hRot(rotX, 0, 0, 1); // creates a quaternion that rotates by angle rotX about the positive Z axis
Vec3f vAxis = hRot * camRight; // applies hRot to the camera's right vector
Quat vRot(rotY, vAxis); // creates a quaternion that rotates by angle rotY about the rotated camera's right vector
Quat rQuat = hRot * vRot; // creates the total rotation
camUp = rQuat * camUp;
camRight = rQuat * camRight;
camView = rQuat * camView;
Hope this helps you solve your problem.

glRotate always works around the origin. If you do:
glPushMatrix();
glTranslated(x,y,z);
glRotated(theta,1,0,0);
glTranslated(-x,-y,-z);
drawObject();
glPopMatrix();
Then the 'object' is rotate around (x,y,z) instead of the origin, because you moved (x,y,z) to the origin, did the rotation, and then pushed (x,y,z) back where it started.
However, I don't think that's going to be enough to get the effect you're describing. If you always want transformations to be done with respect to the current frame of reference, then you need to keep track of the transformation matrix yourself. This why people use Quaternion based cameras.

Related

Rotating object in OpenGL around specific point

I'm modelling Newtons Cradle and I am having trouble with wires/strings rotation as they currently rotate around their centre instead of where they are attached to the frame. There seem to be very little info online apart from " Translate to rotation point, rotate, translate back" which does not seem to work.
std::stack<glm::mat4>model;
model.push(glm::mat4(1.0f));
model.top() = glm::translate(model.top(), glm::vec3(x, y, z));
model.top() = glm::rotate(model.top(), vx, glm::vec3(1, 0, 0)); //rotating in clockwise direction around x-axis
model.top() = glm::rotate(model.top(), vy, glm::vec3(0, 1, 0)); //rotating in clockwise direction around y-axis
model.top() = glm::rotate(model.top(), vz, glm::vec3(0, 0, 1)); //rotating in clockwise direction around z-axis
model.top() = glm::scale(model.top(), glm::vec3(scale/40, scale*5, scale/40));//scale equally in all axis
model.top() = glm::translate(model.top(), glm::vec3(-x, -y, -z));
glUniformMatrix4fv(modelID, 1, GL_FALSE, &model.top()[0][0]);
glm::mat3 normalmatrix = glm::transpose(glm::inverse(glm::mat3(View * model.top())));
glUniformMatrix3fv(normalmatrixID, 1, GL_FALSE, &normalmatrix[0][0])
This is the bit that translates and rotates or its current iteration, stack really does nothing at the moment.
If my problem is unclear imagine analogue clock arm, it will rotate around the clock centre at its end and not by arms itself centre. I know there is no native implementation to rotate object around specific point in OpenGl
As a side note, there is no longer any "native" implementation of any matrix stuff in OpenGL (outside of GLSL).
Your problem here is that you're only setting the top() matrix to a value instead of accumulating the transformations by multiplying them together.
You will probably also later notice a problem where it doesn't move back into the same spot (after making it multiply the matrices together). This is because you're scaling the object down a lot before translating back to the original spot. The order of your transformations matter.
A tutorial like this one that provides an in-depth explanation of all of this stuff will likely be very useful to you:
http://www.opengl-tutorial.org/beginners-tutorials/tutorial-3-matrices/

Rotating 2D camera to space ship's heading in OpenGL (OpenTK)

The game is a top-down 2D space ship game -- think of "Asteroids."
Box2Dx is the physics engine and I extended the included DebugDraw, based on OpenTK, to draw additional game objects. Moving the camera so it's always centered on the player's ship and zooming in and out work perfectly. However, I really need the camera to rotate along with the ship so it's always facing in the same direction. That is, the ship will appear to be frozen in the center of the screen and the rest of the game world rotates around it as it turns.
I've tried adapting code samples, but nothing works. The best I've been able to achieve is a skewed and cut-off rendering.
Render loop:
// Clear.
Gl.glClear(Gl.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | Gl.GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT);
// other rendering omitted (planets, ships, etc.)
this.OpenGlControl.Draw();
Update view -- centers on ship and should rotate to match its angle. For now, I'm just trying to rotate it by an arbitrary angle for a proof of concept, but no dice:
public void RefreshView()
{
int width = this.OpenGlControl.Width;
int height = this.OpenGlControl.Height;
Gl.glViewport(0, 0, width, height);
Gl.glMatrixMode(Gl.GL_PROJECTION);
Gl.glLoadIdentity();
float ratio = (float)width / (float)height;
Vec2 extents = new Vec2(ratio * 25.0f, 25.0f);
extents *= viewZoom;
// rotate the view
var shipAngle = 180.0f; // just a test angle for proof of concept
Gl.glRotatef(shipAngle, 0, 0, 0);
Vec2 lower = this.viewCenter - extents;
Vec2 upper = this.viewCenter + extents;
// L/R/B/T
Glu.gluOrtho2D(lower.X, upper.X, lower.Y, upper.Y);
Gl.glMatrixMode(Gl.GL_MODELVIEW);
}
Now, I'm obviously doing this wrong. Degrees of 0 and 180 will keep it right-side-up or flip it, but any other degree will actually zoom it in/out or result in only blackness, nothing rendered. Below are examples:
If ship angle is 0.0f, then game world is as expected:
Degree of 180.0f flips it vertically... seems promising:
Degree of 45 zooms out and doesn't rotate at all... that's odd:
Degree of 90 returns all black. In case you've never seen black:
Please help!
Firstly the 2-4 arguments are the axis, so please state them correctly as stated by #pingul.
More importantly the rotation is applied to the projection matrix.
// L/R/B/T
Glu.gluOrtho2D(lower.X, upper.X, lower.Y, upper.Y);
In this line your Orthogonal 2D projection matrix is being multiplied with the previous rotation and applied to your projection matrix. Which I believe is not what you want.
The solution would be move your rotation call to a place after the model view matrix mode is selected, as below
// L/R/B/T
Glu.gluOrtho2D(lower.X, upper.X, lower.Y, upper.Y);
Gl.glMatrixMode(Gl.GL_MODELVIEW);
// rotate the view
var shipAngle = 180.0f; // just a test angle for proof of concept
Gl.glRotatef(shipAngle, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f);
And now your rotations will be applied to the model-view matrix stack. (I believe this is the effect you want). Keep in mind that glRotatef() creates a rotation matrix and multiplies it with the matrix at the top of the selected stack stack.
I would also strongly suggest you move away from fixed function pipeline if possible as suggested by #BDL.

How to correctly represent 3D rotation in games

In most 3D platform games, only rotation around the Y axis is needed since the player is always positioned upright.
However, for a 3D space game where the player needs to be rotated on all axises, what is the best way to represent the rotation?
I first tried using Euler angles:
glRotatef(anglex, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f);
glRotatef(angley, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f);
glRotatef(anglez, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f);
The problem I had with this approach is that after each rotation, the axises change. For example, when anglex and angley are 0, anglez rotates the ship around its wings, however if anglex or angley are non zero, this is no longer true. I want anglez to always rotate around the wings, irrelevant of anglex and angley.
I read that quaternions can be used to exhibit this desired behavior however was unable to achieve it in practice.
I assume my issue is due to the fact that I am basically still using Euler angles, but am converting the rotation to its quaternion representation before usage.
struct quaternion q = eulerToQuaternion(anglex, angley, anglez);
struct matrix m = quaternionToMatrix(q);
glMultMatrix(&m);
However, if storing each X, Y, and Z angle directly is incorrect, how do I say "Rotate the ship around the wings (or any consistent axis) by 1 degree" when my rotation is stored as a quaternion?
Additionally, I want to be able to translate the model at the angle that it is rotated by. Say I have just a quaternion with q.x, q.y, q.z, and q.w, how can I move it?
Quaternions are very good way to represent rotations, because they are efficient, but I prefer to represent the full state "position and orientation" by 4x4 matrices.
So, imagine you have a 4x4 matrix for every object in the scene. Initially, when the object is unrotated and untraslated, this matrix is the identity matrix, this is what I will call "original state". Suppose, for instance, the nose of your ship points towards -z in its original state, so a rotation matrix that spin the ship along the z axis is:
Matrix4 around_z(radian angle) {
c = cos(angle);
s = sin(angle);
return Matrix4(c, -s, 0, 0,
s, c, 0, 0,
0, 0, 1, 0,
0, 0, 0, 1);
}
now, if your ship is anywhere in space and rotated to any direction, and lets call this state t, if you want to spin the ship around z axis for an angle amount as if it was on its "original state", it would be:
t = t * around_z(angle);
And when drawing with OpenGL, t is what you multiply for every vertex of that ship. This assumes you are using column vectors (as OpenGL does), and be aware that matrices in OpenGL are stored columns first.
Basically, your problem seems to be with the order you are applying your rotations. See, quaternions and matrices multiplication are non-commutative. So, if instead, you write:
t = around_z(angle) * t;
You will have the around_z rotation applied not to the "original state" z, but to global coordinate z, with the ship already affected by the initial transformation (roatated and translated). This is the same thing when you call the glRotate and glTranslate functions. The order they are called matters.
Being a little more specific for your problem: you have the absolute translation trans, and the rotation around its center rot. You would update each object in your scene with something like:
void update(quaternion delta_rot, vector delta_trans) {
rot = rot * delta_rot;
trans = trans + rot.apply(delta_trans);
}
Where delta_rot and delta_trans are both expressed in coordinates relative to the original state, so, if you want to propel your ship forward 0.5 units, your delta_trans would be (0, 0, -0.5). To draw, it would be something like:
void draw() {
// Apply the absolute translation first
glLoadIdentity();
glTranslatevf(&trans);
// Apply the absolute rotation last
struct matrix m = quaternionToMatrix(q);
glMultMatrix(&m);
// This sequence is equivalent to:
// final_vertex_position = translation_matrix * rotation_matrix * vertex;
// ... draw stuff
}
The order of the calls I choose by reading the manual for glTranslate and glMultMatrix, to guarantee the order the transformations are applied.
About rot.apply()
As explained at Wikipedia article Quaternions and spatial rotation, to apply a rotation described by quaternion q on a vector p, it would be rp = q * p * q^(-1), where rp is the newly rotated vector. If you have a working quaternion library implemented on your game, you should either already have this operation implemented, or should implement it now, because this is the core of using quaternions as rotations.
For instance, if you have a quaternion that describes a rotation of 90° around (0,0,1), if you apply it to (1,0,0), you will have the vector (0,1,0), i.e. you have the original vector rotated by the quaternion. This is equivalent to converting your quaternion to matrix, and doing a matrix to colum-vector multiplication (by matrix multiplication rules, it yields another column-vector, the rotated vector).

How to properly rotate a quaternion along all axis?

I want to code a first person camera with its rotation stored in a quaternion. Unfortunately there is something wrong with the rotation.
The following function is responsible to rotate the camera. The parameters Mouse and Speed pass the mouse movement and rotation speed. Then the function fetches the rotation quaternion, rotates it and stores the result. By the way, I'm using Bullet Physics that is where the types and functions come from.
void Rotate(vec2 Mouse, float Speed)
{
btTransform transform = camera->getWorldTransform();
btQuaternion rotation = transform.getRotation();
Mouse = Mouse * Speed; // apply mouse sensitivity
btQuaternion change(Mouse.y, Mouse.x, 0); // create quaternion from angles
rotation = change * rotation; // rotate camera by that
transform.setRotation(rotation);
camera->setWorldTransform(transform);
}
To illustrate the resulting camera rotation when the mouse moves, I show you a hand drawing. On the left side the wrong rotation the camera actually performs is shown. On the right side the desired correct case is shown. The arrows indicate how the camera is rotate when moving the mouse up (in orange) and down (in blue).
As you can see, as long as the yaw is zero, the rotation is correct. But the more yaw it has, the smaller the circles in which the camera rotates become. In contrast, the circles should always run along the whole sphere like a longitude.
I am not very familiar with quaternions, so here I ask how to correctly rotate them.
I found out how to properly rotate a quaternion on my own. The key was to find vectors for the axis I want to rotate around. Those are used to create quaternions from axis and angle, when angle is the amount to rotate around the actual axis.
The following code shows what I ended up with. It also allows to roll the camera, which might be useful some time.
void Rotate(btVector3 Amount, float Sensitivity)
{
// fetch current rotation
btTransform transform = camera->getWorldTransform();
btQuaternion rotation = transform.getRotation();
// apply mouse sensitivity
Amount *= Sensitivity;
// create orientation vectors
btVector3 up(0, 1, 0);
btVector3 lookat = quatRotate(rotation, btVector3(0, 0, 1));
btVector3 forward = btVector3(lookat.getX(), 0, lookat.getZ()).normalize();
btVector3 side = btCross(up, forward);
// rotate camera with quaternions created from axis and angle
rotation = btQuaternion(up, Amount.getY()) * rotation;
rotation = btQuaternion(side, Amount.getX()) * rotation;
rotation = btQuaternion(forward, Amount.getZ()) * rotation;
// set new rotation
transform.setRotation(rotation);
camera->setWorldTransform(transform);
}
Since I rarely found information about quaternion rotation, I'll spend some time further explaining the code above.
Fetching and setting the rotation is specific to the physics engine and isn't related to this question so I won't elaborate on this. The next part, multiplying the amount by a mouse sensitivity should be really clear. Let's continue with the direction vectors.
The up vector depends on your own implementation. Most conveniently, the positive Y axis points up, therefore we end up with 0, 1, 0.
The lookat vector represents the direction the camera looks at. We simply rotate a unit vector pointing forward by the camera rotation quaternion. Again, the forward pointing vector depends on your conventions. If the Y axis is up, the positive Z axis might point forward, which is 0, 0, 1.
Do not mix that up with the next vector. It's named forward which references to the camera rotation. Therefore we just need to project the lookat vector to the ground. In this case, we simply take the lookat vector and ignore the up pointing component. For neatness we normalize that vector.
The side vector points leftwards from the camera orientation. Therefore it lies perpendicular to both the up and the forward vector and we can use the cross product to compute it.
Given those vectors, we can correctly rotate the camera quaternion around them. Which you start with, Z, Y or Z, depends on the Euler angle sequence which is, again, a convention varying from application to application. Since I want to rotations to be applied in Y X Z order, I do the following.
First, rotate the camera around the up axis by the amount for the Y rotation. This is yaw.
Then rotate around the side axis, which points leftwards, by the X amount. It's pitch.
And lastly, rotate around the forward vector by the Z amount to apply roll.
To apply those rotations, we need to multiply the quaternions create by axis and angle with the current camera rotation. Lastly we apply the resulted quaternion to the body in the physics simulation.
Matrices and pitch/yaw/roll both having their limitations, I do not use them anymore but use instead quaternions. I rotate the view vector and recalculate first the camera vectors, then the view matrix in regard to the rotated view vector.
void Camera::rotateViewVector(glm::quat quat) {
glm::quat rotatedViewQuat;
quat = glm::normalize(quat);
m_viewVector = glm::normalize(m_viewVector);
glm::quat viewQuat(0.0f,
m_viewVector.x,
m_viewVector.y,
m_viewVector.z);
viewQuat = glm::normalize(viewQuat);
rotatedViewQuat = (quat * viewQuat) * glm::conjugate(quat);
rotatedViewQuat = glm::normalize(rotatedViewQuat);
m_viewVector = glm::normalize(glm::vec3(rotatedViewQuat.x, rotatedViewQuat.y, rotatedViewQuat.z));
m_rightVector = glm::normalize(glm::cross(glm::vec3(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f), m_viewVector));
m_upVector = glm::normalize(glm::cross(m_viewVector, m_rightVector));
}

OpenGL Rotate camera around center-of-scene

I have a scene which is basically a square floor measuring 15x15 (a quad with coordinates (0,0,0) (0,0,15) (15,0,15) (15,0,0) ).
I 've set the center-of-scene to be at (7.5,0,7.5). Problem is I can't figure out how to rotate the camera horizontally around that center of scene (aka make the camera do a 360 horizontal circle around center-of-scene). I know you need to do something with sin and cos, but don't know what exactly.
Here is the code (plain C):
//set camera position
//camera height is 17
GLfloat camx=0, camy=17, camz=0;
//set center of scene
GLfloat xref=7.5, yref=0, zref=7.5;
gluLookAt(camx, camy, camz, xref, yref, zref, 0, 1, 0);
//projection is standard gluPerspective, nothing special
gluPerspective(45, (GLdouble)width/(GLdouble)height, 1, 1000);
You need to modify the camx and camz variables.
The points you want to walk through lie on the circle and their coordinates are determined by x = r*sin(alpha) + 7.5, z = r*cos(alpha) + 7,5, where r is the radius of the circle and alpha is the angle between xy plane and the current position of your camera.
Of course the angle depends on the rotation speed and also on the time from the beginning of the animation. Basically, the only thing you need to do is to set the right angle and then calculate the coordinates from the expressions above.
For more info about the circle coordinates, see Wiki : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_circle
I think there are two ways you can use:
You can use sin/cos to compute your camx and camz position. This picture is a good example how this works.
An alternative would be to move the camera to 7.5, 0, 7.5, then rotate the camera with the camera angle you want. After that you move the camera by -7.5, 0, -7.5.