I'm learning some OpenGL game programing, and I'm stuck in how to implement so the camera follows the mousepointer. Like in a fps game you want to look where your mouse is pointing, but I can't find a nice solution to this while I'm moving. I was thinking of saving one matrix for the move, like walkking and strafing, while using quaternions to handle the rotation. Then make the quaternion to a rotationmatrix, load the identity for the modelview matrix and time this matrix with both matrixes.
There is ofcourse some problems with this, like which matrix we should use in the multiplication first, and the code will be ugly.
So I'm wondering if anyone have a good solution to solving this, so I don't have to find out which matrix to use first, and which gives cleaner code.
Store the camera's view details as a position vector, a view-vector and an up-vector (think of pointing with your thumb stuck out: your finger is the view-vector, and your thumb is the up-vector). Keep these vectors normalized and at 90 degrees to each other. You should be able to see that these three vectors are sufficient to represent any camera position and orientation.
You can use these vectors to transform world-coordinates to camera-coordinates:
Translate by -position;
Rotate around (up-vector 'cross' y-axis) by -(angle between up-vector and y-axis);
Rotate around up-vector by -(angle between view-vector and z-axis).
(I might have got some of my signs the wrong way around there).
You can transform these vectors as the user moves the mouse:
As the mouse moves sideways, rotate the view-vector around the up-vector (or rotate both view-vector and up-vector around y-axis, if you prefer).
As the mouse moves back/forwards, rotate both the view-vector and up-vector around (view-vector 'cross' up-vector).
I don't really have a solution for your problem, but i know the open-source 3d engine Irrlicht has a FPS camera that does exactly what you're looking for and, usually, it has a well-documented source.
You could try looking at how the FPS camera is implemented in Irrlicht or you could even use Irrlicht itself for your project; i used it for a couple of mine when i was in college and it always worked like a charm :)
Related
I'm not quite sure on how I should be making things move using openGL.
Am I supposed to be moving the camera's position around the 3D world, or moving/translating the objects around the camera?
I read online that the camera should stay at the origin and everything else should move around the camera, but wouldn't that be an intensive operation? Like if I have 1000 objects and I'm moving, we'd have to move all of these objects. Would it not be easier to move the camera and keep the world objects where they are?
The way OpenGL works is, conceptually, the camera is always in the center, Y axis up and Z axis forward. If you want to move or rotate the camera, you actually move everything else the opposite way.
This is opposed to Direct3D for example, where you have a separate camera matrix.
It's a minor detail though because mathematically speaking they're exactly the same. Whether you move everything forward or the camera back, it's exactly the same end result. You could even argue that having only one matrix as opposed to lugging around two and multiplying them is a performance gain, but it's extremely minor and usually you'll separate your camera matrix from your world building matrix anyway.
In Opengl, the camera is always located at the eye space coordinate (0., 0., 0.). To give the appearance of moving the camera, your OpenGL application must move the scene with the inverse of the camera transformation.
You don't need to worry about moving/translating objects in your scene. gluLookAt() function does it for you. This function computes the inverse camera transform according to its parameters and multiplies it onto the current matrix stack.
I'm trying to implement an application using OpenGL and I need to implement the basic camera movements: orbit, pan and zoom.
To make it a little clearer, I need Maya-like camera control. Due to the nature of the application, I can't use the good ol' "transform the scene to make it look like the camera moves". So I'm stuck using transform matrices, gluLookAt, and such.
Zoom I know is dead easy, I just have to hook to the depth component of the eye vector (gluLookAt), but I'm not quite sure how to implement the other two, pan and orbit. Has anyone ever done this?
I can't use the good ol' "transform the scene to make it look like the camera moves"
OpenGL has no camera. So you'll end up doing exactly this.
Zoom I know is dead easy, I just have to hook to the depth component of the eye vector (gluLookAt),
This is not a Zoom, this is a Dolly. Zooming means varying the limits of the projection volume, i.e. the extents of a ortho projection, or the field of view of a perspective.
gluLookAt, which you've already run into, is your solution. First three arguments are the camera's position (x,y,z), next three are the camera's center (the point it's looking at), and the final three are the up vector (usually (0,1,0)), which defines the camera's y-z plane.*
It's pretty simple: you just glLoadIdentity();, call gluLookAt(...), and then draw your scene as normally. Personally, I always do all the calculations in the CPU myself. I find that orbiting a point is an extremely common task. My template C/C++ code uses spherical coordinates and looks like:
double camera_center[3] = {0.0,0.0,0.0};
double camera_radius = 4.0;
double camera_rot[2] = {0.0,0.0};
double camera_pos[3] = {
camera_center[0] + camera_radius*cos(radians(camera_rot[0]))*cos(radians(camera_rot[1])),
camera_center[1] + camera_radius* sin(radians(camera_rot[1])),
camera_center[2] + camera_radius*sin(radians(camera_rot[0]))*cos(radians(camera_rot[1]))
};
gluLookAt(
camera_pos[0], camera_pos[1], camera_pos[2],
camera_center[0],camera_center[1],camera_center[2],
0,1,0
);
Clearly you can adjust camera_radius, which will change the "zoom" of the camera, camera_rot, which will change the rotation of the camera about its axes, or camera_center, which will change the point about which the camera orbits.
*The only other tricky bit is learning exactly what all that means. To clarify, because the internet is lacking:
The position is the (x,y,z) position of the camera. Pretty straightforward.
The center is the (x,y,z) point the camera is focusing at. You're basically looking along an imaginary ray from the position to the center.
Now, your camera could still be looking any direction around this vector (e.g., it could be upsidedown, but still looking along the same direction). The up vector is a vector, not a position. It, along with that imaginary vector from the position to the center, form a plane. This is the camera's y-z plane.
Since I gogled for it without finding anything interesting, I would like to ask you for some suggestions regarding if it is better to scale/translate the render itself keeping the camera position fixed or maybe moving closer/further or rotate the camera keeping the render position fixed?
I need a zooming out/in, rotation in all the 3 axes and also this kind of rotation
http://www.reknow.de/downloads/opengl/video.mp4
that is, if I first translate my render and then I apply a rotation, this rotation should consider the center always the windows center, and not the translated one
I need a zooming out/in, rotation in all the 3 axes and also this kind of rotation
What you mean is probably not "zooming" but "panning". And in OpenGL you place the "camera" by moving the scene around, because there is no camera.
Zooming is a change in the focal length, and would be implemented by changeing the FOV of the perspective.
What I'm doing right now is designing a flight simulator of some kind. What I want to know is how I can determine/extract/calculate the camera vector in OpenGL i.e. I want to know the vector which describes the direction the camera is facing.
What I want to do, for example is to simulate a barrel roll. How I thought I could do this is to use the following code:
GL11.glRotatef(raw, vector_x, vector_y, vector_z);
I, however can't figure out how to extract the camera vector.
BTW, I'm using LWJGL and GLApp.
Use the Z (or -Z, depending your matrices handedness) axis of the camera's transformation matrix.
Using OpenGL I'm attempting to draw a primitive map of my campus.
Can anyone explain to me how panning, zooming and rotating is usually implemented?
For example, with panning and zooming, is that simply me adjusting my viewport? So I plot and draw all my lines that compose my map, and then as the user clicks and drags it adjusts my viewport?
For panning, does it shift the x/y values of my viewport and for zooming does it increase/decrease my viewport by some amount? What about for rotation?
For rotation, do I have to do affine transforms for each polyline that represents my campus map? Won't this be expensive to do on the fly on a decent sized map?
Or, is the viewport left the same and panning/zooming/rotation is done in some otherway?
For example, if you go to this link you'll see him describe panning and zooming exactly how I have above, by modifying the viewport.
Is this not correct?
They're achieved by applying a series of glTranslate, glRotate commands (that represent camera position and orientation) before drawing the scene. (technically, you're rotating the whole scene!)
There are utility functions like gluLookAt which sorta abstract some details about this.
To simplyify things, assume you have two vectors representing your camera: position and direction.
gluLookAt takes the position, destination, and up vector.
If you implement a vector class, destinaion = position + direction should give you a destination point.
Again to make things simple, you can assume the up vector to always be (0,1,0)
Then, before rendering anything in your scene, load the identity matrix and call gluLookAt
glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW);
glLoadIdentity();
gluLookAt( source.x, source.y, source.z, destination.x, destination.y, destination.z, 0, 1, 0 );
Then start drawing your objects
You can let the user span by changing the position slightly to the right or to the left. Rotation is a bit more complicated as you have to rotate the direction vector. Assuming that what you're rotating is the camera, not some object in the scene.
One problem is, if you only have a direction vector "forward" how do you move it? where is the right and left?
My approach in this case is to just take the cross product of "direction" and (0,1,0).
Now you can move the camera to the left and to the right using something like:
position = position + right * amount; //amount < 0 moves to the left
You can move forward using the "direction vector", but IMO it's better to restrict movement to a horizontal plane, so get the forward vector the same way we got the right vector:
forward = cross( up, right )
To be honest, this is somewhat of a hackish approach.
The proper approach is to use a more "sophisticated" data structure to represent the "orientation" of the camera, not just the forward direction. However, since you're just starting out, it's good to take things one step at a time.
All of these "actions" can be achieved using model-view matrix transformation functions. You should read about glTranslatef (panning), glScalef (zoom), glRotatef (rotation). You also should need to read some basic tutorial about OpenGL, you might find this link useful.
Generally there are three steps that are applied whenever you reference any point in 3d space within opengl.
Given a Local point
Local -> World Transform
World -> Camera Transform
Camera -> Screen Transform (usually a projection. depends on if you're using perspective or orthogonal)
Each of these transforms is taking your 3d point, and multiplying by a matrix.
When you are rotating the camera, it is generally changing the world -> camera transform by multiplying the transform matrix by your rotation/pan/zoom affine transformation. Since all of your points are re-rendered each frame, the new matrix gets applied to your points, and it gives the appearance of a rotation.