Camera Chasing Issue

Scripting Issues
1

So I set up the camera to follow an Actor…

def CameraFollow(self,task):
  base.cam.reparentTo(self.pandaActor)
  base.cam.setPos(x,y,z)

Initially the camera is between the panda’s legs, below the belly, so in trying to figure out the coordinate system I wrote some script to adjust the camera’s individual x, y, and z coords with hotkeys and display their values on the screen.

To my surprise i found that I had to back the camera out to 1300 units on the Y axis just to see most of it’s face. Also, there is empty grey space that seems to cover most of the models when I zoom out that far, which I can only assume is the draw distance cutoff for zooming out so far.

The scene & model is the basic panda walking sequence that comes with the download. One of the samples that comes with panda3d is the shadow effect example that also has a camera chasing the panda, but after viewing the code I found the camera’s position wasn’t set any farther then 10 units away on any single axis, so obviously something is going wrong.

Any ideas? thanks.

2

The distance cutoff you’re seeing is probably the far clip of the camera lens. You can adjust that easily:
panda3d.org/manual/index.php/Lense … ld_of_View

Or, you can just scale your model down a lot.

3

Yea I ended up adjusting the base.camLens.setFov() so that now the grey disappears. The scaling still seems to be off though.

Everything else seems to move quite significantly however when I adjust it’s position by even 1 unit, and the camera chasing the actor still has to be moved over 1000 units to make a difference. The panda’s scale is .005 on every axis.

Just doesn’t seem to make sense that the camera would have a different xyz unit scale then the rest of the objects in the scene.

4

Hmm, I rather meant the Far clip (setFar) of the camera, rather than the field of view.

5

err… I ment to say base.camLense.setNearFar

6

Nothing inherently special about the camera node; it inherits its scale from its parent, just like any other node. If it’s got a crazy scale on it, it must have come from somewhere.

David