How do I accomplish a zoom from my first person perspective? I am using alot, if not all, of TestQ3 as a base.
I can accomplish a bit of a zoom by scaling up and down the rootNode, but this makes the objects appear ‘closer’ to one another, for obvious reasons. if scaling is the answer or at least AN answer, how do I go about that?
the frustum confuses me and there are no topics or articles I can find anywhere on the net to explain what it even does or how it does it.
I want to pull off the effect of looking down the sights of a gun, and in doing so zoom the view slightly.
Thanks in advance!
Scaling is most definitely not the solution to your problem, it will just introduce so so many issues and headaches down the road.
The frustum is basically the 3d area that is visible on the screen, like an imaginary box that sits in front of the camera and surrounds everything that is currently in view, if you make this box smaller, there is less stuff to draw on the screen, but since the screen doesn’t get any smaller, the camera needs to ‘scale up’ or ‘zoom in’ on what is left in the frustum to fill up the screen (very very rough explanation, there is obviously heaps more to it).
I achieved a zooming chase camera in mTheoryGame by changing the camera frustum, you can see the result at about 1:12 in the video in this post .
Here is roughly what I did …
[java]float b,t,l,r;
public void setCamZoomLevel(float val) {
cam.setFrustumBottom(bval);
cam.setFrustumLeft(lval);
cam.setFrustumTop(tval);
cam.setFrustumRight(rval);
}
// called once during initialization
private void storeCamFrustum() {
b = cam.getFrustumBottom();
t = cam.getFrustumTop();
l = cam.getFrustumLeft();
r = cam.getFrustumRight();
}[/java]
‘cam’ being a ChaseCam.
Good Luck
James
3 Likes
Wow what an incredibly simple task. I knew it couldn’t be THAT hard!
Thank you so so much, you’ve put a big smile on my face. It worked perfectly
And I appreciate your dumbed down explanation, really puts things in perspective. << Ya…that was a pun…