how to set lookAt vector

[cekees]

@jasongrout, I'm having trouble pointing the camera to the centroid of my scene, so I get clunky behavior from the orbital controls. Is there a direct way I can set it? I believe it's the lookAt vector in three.js, but I don't see it exposed by pythreejs.

[jasongrout]

Did you try the look_at method on the camera object? The three.js lookAt function is a function that calculates the correct rotation (https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/master/src/core/Object3D.js#L284). We tried to duplicate this in python in the look_at function (https://github.com/jasongrout/pythreejs/blob/master/pythreejs/pythreejs.py#L197)

[jasongrout]

Curiously, I'm not getting a look_at call to the camera to work. It does seem to work with normal objects in the scene, however. Investigating....

[jasongrout]

Okay, turns out the camera look_at function is overridden by the OrbitControls target. So I just exposed the OrbitControls target value. So do something like:

OrbitControls(target=(1,1,1), controlling = ...)

or if you instead do something like c = OrbitControls(controlling=...), just update it with c.target=(1,1,1).

Let me know if this works for you.

[jasongrout]

(You'll have to pull the latest master to get that commit, of course)

[cekees]

That works, thanks! I backported to a branch for IPython 3.1.0 and pushed it here: https://github.com/erdc-cm/pythreejs/tree/ipy3.1.0

[jasongrout]

Can you make a pull request?

[jasongrout]

@cekees - I think jasongrout@f06441d may make the master branch compatible with IPython 3.1. If you have time, can you check to see if master now works with IPython 3.1?

[ivmi]

I am still not able to change camera angle from python. I have orbitcontroller and change its target position.
It works when orbitcontroller is not used.

Can anyone confirm it works or provide working example?