[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

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