[Bf-funboard] Track constraint proposal
Martin Poirier
theeth at yahoo.com
Thu Oct 12 12:30:23 CEST 2006
--- "Matthew H. Plough" <mplough at Princeton.EDU> wrote:
> I propose an extension to the Track constraint that
> would allow the
> "up" direction to be specified intuitively, while
> also allowing it to
> be animated.
>
> The Track constraint is not affine invariant. It
> needs to be; there
> is a unique "up" direction.
>
> One common use for tracking is to create a target
> camera -- instead
> of directly specifying the camera rotation, the user
> specifies it
> indirectly by placing an empty where the camera
> should look and
> causing the camera to track the empty.
>
> Right now, this has two parts:
> 1) The camera looks at the empty. The camera is
> rotated so that its
> y axis (for example) points toward the empty.
> 2) A global "up" axis, generally the global z axis,
> then constrains
> the rotation about the camera's local y axis,
> providing a steady camera.
>
> Consider the implementation of part 2:
>
> Let the line through the camera's location and the
> empty's location
> be called line L. Let a plane normal to L be called
> P. Let the
> projection of the global z axis onto P be called U,
> for "up".
>
> The camera is rotated about its y axis until U is
> parallel to the
> camera's local z axis. This works fine until L is
> nearly parallel to
> the global z axis. When this happens, U is nearly
> zero length, and
> the camera rotates wildly.
>
>
> For scenes shot indoors, or outdoor scenes without a
> lot of motion,
> this implementation works fine. It's really bad,
> though, when the
> camera does a lot of maneuvering -- what if I want
> my shot to fly in
> a half-circle, and then straight down a hole? The
> camera will rotate
> like crazy unless I painstakingly align things
> manually, which is
> time consuming and inefficient.
>
> A simple extension to the current implementation
> would work great.
> Instead of using a global "up" axis, use a local
> "up" axis; allow the
> tracked empty's z axis to supply the "up" direction.
>
> Now, instead of projecting the global z axis onto P,
> the empty's
> local z axis would be projected onto P. This way,
> when I fly the
> camera down a hole, all I have to do is rotate the
> empty through 90
> degrees, thereby keeping U nondegenerate, and making
> the necessary
> rotation about the camera's y axis unambiguous and
> stable. Also, as
> I'm flying the camera around, I can bank it by
> rotating the empty
> left to right.
>
>
> Any crits?
Sounds good.
You want to implement it? ;)
(As an option, of course)
Martin
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
More information about the Bf-funboard
mailing list