SimpleOrbitControls

An alternative to the default OrbitControls provided by THREE.js examples.

Live demo can be found here.

Note: demo only works on desktop; to use on mobile you need to register to touch events and provide them as input (see usage for more info).

What Is It

THREE.js examples comes with a great Orbit Camera Controller.

While its very useful and a good starting point, I wanted something slightly different, mainly a controller that don't interact with events internally (and instead being controlled from outside) and wanted to use Lerping instead of delta and damping, which feels different imo.

So I created this class instead, rewritten from scratch. Its a shorter, more basic implementation, which I believe is easier to understand and modify to more specific needs.

Usage

SimpleOrbitControls does not register to any browser events by design. That means that you need to implement that part on your own and provide input commands every update call:

// create the orbit controller
var controls = new THREE.SimpleOrbitControls(renderer, scene, camera);

// inside your main loop, call this every update call:
var controllerInput = {
    deltaTime: deltaTime,                                      // time passed, in seconds, since last update call
    rotateHorizontally: rotateHorizontally,                    // rotation around y axis
    rotateVertically: rotateVertically,                        // rotate vertically around x / z axis
    moveOffsetVertically: moveY,                               // move the target offset (affect lookat AND camera position), along camera's Y axis. 
    moveOffsetHorizontally: moveXZ,                            // move the target offset left / right, relative to camera's world direction.
    zoom: zoom,                                                // zoom in / out
}
controls.update(controllerInput);

For more info, check out the example under demo/.

License

MIT, you can use it for any purpose.