2021 08 28

• Three.js journey fun, positioning.

• mesh and camera objects are inherited from the base Object3D class. which has the property position. the position has x, y and z properties to control the position on a canvas.

  • x is right - left
  • y is up - down
  • z is forward- back
  • mutating these values is synchronous, so execution order is important. it’s written in a very imperative way.

Useful methods

• mesh.position.length() returns the length of the object from the center of the scene.

• mesh.position.distanceTo(camera.position) return the distance of the object to a given camera object

• mesh.position.normalise() rounds up the length to whole number.

• mesh.position.set() is a quick way to move the position of an object. it takes 3 args x,yand z.

• View the a visual helper of the axes with AxesHelper(). blue = z , green = y m red = x. The length of the line represent 1 unit.

const axesHelper = new THREE.AxesHelper();
scene.add(axesHelper);

• normalise your values and stick to it. e,g 1 === 1km. It can change from project to project, but just be consistent.

• Scaling an object works in the same way:

  • mesh.scale which also has x, y and z properties
  • it has very similar properties to position

• Rotations are slightly harder

  • you can do this with either rotation or quaternion
  • the rotation object is an Euler class. This requires you think about what axis the object is rotating on.
  • To rotate an object you have to use pi either 3.14159 or Math.Pi a whole rotation is pi x 2
  • Warning, you can get into “Gimbal” lock when doing too many rotations. this is where changing the rotations does nothing.
    • to work around rotate the x, y and z properties in a different orders. remember how imperative the execution order is rotation.reorder can you change the rotation orders by applying a string in the order you want e.g rotation.reorder('YXZ')
  • quaternion is a mathematical way that can get around these gimbal locks. It’s a representation of the rotation which will “just work”. This is a black box for now.

• lookAt() is a really useful method to look directly at another Vector3 object. e.g mesh.position . you can do something like this camera.lookAt(mesh.position) so the camera tracks an object.

• 3D objects get very complicated, so if you want to create lots of 3d object and group them use new THREE.Group(). Objects can be added to the group so that they can be rotated and scaled all at the same time.