So originally I wanted my little 'ship' to have turrets that track a target. This is the jfiddle for it. http://jsfiddle.net/czGZF/2/ When they track, they act odd. I noticed that it thinks that the turret is slighly next to it (at the origin), by this peice of code.
turret_a.position.y = .25;
turret_a.position.z = 2;
However, I had done that so it could be a relative position for when i called (below) to add it to the 'base ship'
ship = new THREE.Object3D();
ship.add( ship_base );
ship.add( turret_a ) ;
When i changed the position of turret_a after it had been added to the ship, and after the ship was added to the scene, the turret tracked mostly how i wanted it to look.
I guess my question is, Why is the lookAt() function using its old location of that, and not the location of where it currently is on its parent object to determine the rotation angles that it needs to be at?
If you look at the code for Object3D.lookA(), you will see
// This routine does not support objects with rotated and/or translated parent(s)
Your code works if the parent ship is located at the origin and is not rotated.
Updated fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/czGZF/4/
three.js r.59
From the API, the lookAt() method for Camera objects is defined to use world position, as you've discovered. This seems to be relatively common way to handle things.
I'm not that familiar with the three.js API in particular, but it appears that if you want to get the global position of ball, you can use the following:
var targetPos = ball.position.clone();
ball.localToWorld(targetPos);
Hopefully that gets you closer to your goal. Unfortunately, the fiddle you have seems to be (very) non-deterministic, so I can't quickly get a 100% solution for you.
Related
So I'm using Three.js and I have some cubes inside of a box. I'm using the Transform Control to move the cubes around inside of the box with my mouse. I'd like to use raycasting in order to check for collisions. The question is how to I prevent the transform controller from moving the object if there is a collision? I'd like to stop it if it hits the wall. By the way, I'm on version r81 for Three.js.
UPDATE: I've used the size of the room to constrain the cubes from
moving outside of the room. This seems to work well. Is there a way
to use the cannon.js just for collisions? I don't want the momentum
or gravity or any other feature. JUST the collision check and to stop
it dead in its tracks when there is a collision.
I know this post is from a long time ago, but hopefully a googler finds this helpful. I wasn't able to stop the user from moving my object, but I was able to move it back to its proper position immediately afterward by adding some logic to the render method.
For the original poster's problem with collisions, you could attach an event listener to the transform controls and request the object to be repositioned if it is in an illegal state.
transformControls.addEventListener('objectChange', (e) => {
if (illegalPosition(this.obj.position)) {
needsReset = true;
}
lastPosition = attachedObject.position.clone();
});
and then in your render function
if (needsReset) {
attachedObject.position.set(lastPosition.x, lastPosition.y, lastPosition.z);
}
If this feels a little hacky, that's because it is. But for those of us who don't have the time or skill to read and modify TransformControls.js, I think it may prove helpful.
You could create helper raycaster and place all colliders in separate container. After movement is applied to object move raycaster to its position and test if ray intersects any of other objects in container. If yes: reset previous position for that object. In case of cube colliders you could want to raycast from cube center in multiple directions with half of side length as ray length.
Ben S does have the best and most painless way to implement collision detection with transform controls. Within a event listener.
But I don't know if the time of writing his answer he knew about or if there even was a function called "requestAnimationFrame". All you would have to do for collision detection instead of simply resetting the models position is to set up your render call within a loop (60 fps) by adding "requestAnimationFrame" to your render (I call it animate since that is more descriptive) function.
Since it is in a loop and is called when the every frame the scene is drawn it will just not allow the object to move past the point of collision.
function animate() {
// Called to draw onto screen every frame (60fps).
requestAnimationFrame(animate);
renderer.render(scene, camera);
}
And your event listener would just look like this.
control.addEventListener('objectChange', (e) => {
// Collision detection code here. Set colliding model position here.
// No need to set it in render
});
Old post, I know. But here is a method that is still fairly simple but does not flicker or use ray casting. The biggest catch here is that you have a little bit of a bounce if you move the Transform control really quickly. But otherwise it seems to work fairly well. You can control the precision of the collision by adjusting the step value.
let transStart = null;
//capture objects position on start
control.addEventListener('mouseDown', function(){
transStart = control.object.position.clone();
})
//you'll have to provide your own collision function
control.addEventListener('objectChange', function(e){
if(collision(sphere, cube)){ stopControls() };
});
function stopControls(){
if(control.dragging && stopAt){
//calculate direction object was moving at time of collision
const s = transStart;
const e = control.object.position.clone();
const n = e.clone().sub(s).negate().normalize();
//janky hack nonsense that stops the transform control from
//continuing without making the camera controller go nuts.
control.pointerUp({button:0});
control.dragging = true;
//translate back the direction it came by the step amount and do not
//stop until the objects are no longer colliding.
//Increase the step size if you do not need super precise collision
//detection. It will save calculations.
let step = 0.00005;
while(colliding(sphere, cube)){
sphere.translateOnAxis( n, step ) ;
sphere.updateMatrix();
}
}
}
I'm working on a modification to vis.js's Graph3d to do a filled line graph, like this:
The hard part - unsurprisingly - is working out the rendering order for the polygons. I think I can do this by checking whether a ray from the viewer to a given line B crosses line A:
In this example, since line A is "in the way" of line B, we should draw line A first. I'll use a snippet of code from How do you detect where two line segments intersect? to check whether the lines cross.
However, I haven't figured how to find the position of the user's view. I kind of assumed this would be the camera object, so wrote a little bit of debug code to draw the camera on the graph:
var camera = this._convert3Dto2D(this.camera.getCameraLocation());
ctx.strokeStyle = Math.random()>0.5 ? 'ff0000' : '00ff00';
ctx.beginPath();
ctx.moveTo(camera.x, camera.y);
ctx.lineTo(camera.x, camera.y+5);
ctx.stroke();
In fact, the camera co-ordinates as measured by this are always at 0,0,0 on the graph (which would be the far top right on the above screengrab). What I need, I think, is effectively the bottom of the screen.
How can I find this? Or is there a better way to achieve what I'm trying to do?
I don't know if this is still an active issue, but FWIW, Graph3D has internal handling of the sort ordering.
All graph points are sorted with respect to the viewpoint, using a representative coordinate called point.bottom. The rendering is then done using this ordering, with the most distant elements drawn first. This works fine as long as none of the elements intersect; in that case, you can expect artefacts.
Basically, all you need to do, is define point.bottom per graph polygon, and Graph3D will then pick it up from there.
If you are still interested in working on this:
This happens in Graph3d.js, method Graph3d.prototype._calcTranslations(). For an example, have a look at how the Grid and Surface graph elements are initialized in Graph3d.prototype._getDataPoints(). The relevant code is:
obj = {};
obj.point = point3d;
obj.trans = undefined;
obj.screen = undefined;
obj.bottom = new Point3d(x, y, this.zRange.min);
I'm currently making a 3d space fighter game for my school project, but I encounter a problem when I want to spawn a projectile according to my ship front face or direction it's facing.
I do find a way to spawn projectile according direction we are facing using vector in the following example
http://www.isaacsukin.com/news/2012/06/how-build-first-person-shooter-browser-threejs-and-webglhtml5-canvas
but I still does'nt undestand how this vector work. Can someone explain to me ?
I understand it is more an linear algebra question than programming. First you must fully understand, what Vector is, and what isn't.
Often mistake is, that a Vector is some coordinate in 3D space (x,y,z). This is no true and this thinking will not allow understand, how to correctly work with vectors in space and let's you ask questions like this one.
https://www.khanacademy.org/math/linear-algebra/vectors-and-spaces
https://www.khanacademy.org/math/linear-algebra/vectors-and-spaces/vectors/v/vector-introduction-linear-algebra
If you need only to copy object rotation, you can use obj2.rotation.set(obj1.rotation.x,obj1.rotation.y,obj1.rotation.z)
If you want so put something to the space object facing, you can use object as parent:
var my_vect = new THREE.Object3D(); // create vector
obj1.add(my_vect); // add to your object
obj1.rotation.set(1,2,3); // rotate object
my_vect.position.translateX(1); // move vector 1 unit before the object
obj1.localToWorld( my_vect.position); // get global coords from local coords
actually my_vect.position.x,my_vect.position.y,my_vect.position.z are the numbers in your scene before the object respecting object orientation.
On this example we can move inside a field of spheres but into certain limits. I want to be able to move infinitely among them. How can I do that ?
The trick is to reuse the spheres that are behind the camera and put them in front of it. Look at how it is done in this example. Here the programmer knows that the user will continue in the same direction so he removes the trees that come at a certain position.
If you use something like the example you quoted, you cannot know which direction the user will take. And so, you can use the same trick, but have to code it an other way. The most obvious is to check the distances with all the spheres regularly, if the user moves. If one sphere is too far behind the camera, you mirror it so it faces the camera, behind the fog.
'Regularly' can mean two things depending on your real number of spheres in your scene :
If you have a small scene and few spheres you can check those distances in your render loop. Neither cheap nor useful, 60 per seconds, but that can be the first coding step
Then the best way would be to use a web worker : you send the positions of the camera and those of the spheres, you let the worker compute all the stuff in its thread, and send instructions back : 'move those spheres to those positions'. Every seconds is more reasonable in the threejs example, but up to you to decide that depending on your scene.
NOTE : if you have a lot of spheres, or any meshes you use instead, like more than 20-30, having a mesh for each of them will slower performances. With few trees on the examples i linked it is ok, but with more objects and/or a heavier scene,
think about merging them all in a single geometry. You can check which sphere is where by deducing from the vertices indices, or adding an attribute that defines each sphere.
this will also impact the worker delay : it will have more to compute so it will need more time.
NOTE 2 : Note 1 would of course delete the level of details that the example aims to illustrate :) (Unless you also implement your own while checking the distances of the spheres....)
If you want to have an illusion of infinite world then you could:
Break your world space into regions (for example cubes).
Detect which region you are currently in.
Make sure you have objects (spheres) in neighbour regions. If some of regions are empty - fix it.
Clear regions which are not needed anymore.
For this you might want to have some class like this:
Class Region {
bool isEmpty = true;
Vector3 center;
float radius; // or 'range'
Array<Sphere> = null; // storage of your objects
// constructors / destructor
generateObjects(params); // perlin noise might be helpful there
removeObjects();
}
and do something like this periodically:
void updateRegions() {
computeClosestGridCoord(myPosition); // which is center of your current region
lookForNeighbourRegions(regionsArray); // and add new Region if needed
deleteOldRegionsStuff(regionsArray);
}
I googled far and wide but I haven't found the solution to what I think to actually be a pretty common situation. Say I have a THREE.PerspectiveCamera initialized to look at a certain point in space:
var camera = new THREE.PerspectiveCamera(45, 2, 0.1, 100);
var target = new THREE.Vector3(1, 2, 3);
camera.lookAt(target);
Now, later on in the code I'd like to be able to find out the coordinates of target by simply querying camera.
I tried what suggested in this question, adapting it to my own scenario:
var vector = new THREE.Vector3();
vector.applyQuaternion(camera.quaternion);
console.log(vector);
But it logs a vector of coordinates (0, 0, 0) instead of the correct coordinates (which, in my example, should be (1, 2, 3)).
Any insights? Cheers.
EDIT:
Ok so I'm going to try to contextualize here, so as to justify why MrTrustworthy's solution is unfortunately not applicable in my scenario. I'm trying to tweak the THREE.OrbitControls library for my purposes, since I noticed that when using it, it overrides whichever position the camera was looking at originally. This has also been reported here. Basically, on line 36 of OrbitControls.js (I'm using the version which can be found here) this.target is initialized to a new THREE.Vector3(); I found out that if I manually set it to equal the same vector I use as argument of camera.lookAt() everything works just fine: I can start panning, orbiting and zooming the scene from the same POV I would see the scene from if I didn't apply the controls. Of course, I cannot hard-code this information into OrbitControls.js because it would require me to change it every time I want to change the initial "lookAt" of my camera; and if I were to follow MrTrustworthy's suggestion I would have to change line 36 of OrbitControls.js to read like this: this.target = object.targetRef (or this.target = object.targetRef || new THREE.Vecotr3()), which is also too "opinionated" (it would always require object to have a targetRef property, whereas I'm trying to stick to using only three.js's existing object properties and methods). Hope this helps get a better understanding of my case. Cheers.
If your only usecase is "I want to be able to access the camera-targets position via the camera object", you could just put a reference into the camera object.
var camera = new THREE.PerspectiveCamera(45, 2, 0.1, 100);
var target = new THREE.Vector3(1, 2, 3);
camera.lookAt(target);
camera.targetRef = target;
//access it
var iNeedThisNow = camera.targetRef;
I figured it out and wrote my solution here. Since the issue affects both THREE.TrackballControls and THREE.OrbitControls, the solution involves applying a slight change to both those files. I wonder if it can be considered a valid change and make its way to rev. 70; I will issue a PR on github just for the sake of it :)
Thanks to all those who pitched in.
well you could put the object in parent, have parent lookat, and have the child object rotated 180 degrees. That's the quick noob solution