Dynamically rotating/zooming camera to a certainposition

[Wriker]

Hi,

I am having some difficulties with dynamically zooming on a 3D model. I want
to zoom back to a predefined camera position after the user has orbited and
zoomed around the model freely using the mouse, with animation.

I have a frame handler that moves and rotates the camera in several steps
(i.e. with a maximum "speed"), back to the desired position, by comparing the
camera's current XYZ position with target XYZ.

This works, but if I want to zoom back to a position where the camera is still
rotated, the zooming animation is far from smooth. It tends to move from left
to right, back and forth, until it reaches its final position. I want to have
it move in a STRAIGHT line.

Does anyone know how to accomplish this? I guess I would need to calculate
some kind of path, but I can imagine there is a Lingo method to do this.

Thank you

[Paulygon]

I'm not sure if I have my head around the specifics you're going for, but in
general I've had great success using bezier calculations. Paul Lemon opened it
up for me when I found this:
<a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge
href="http://www.directorforum.de/showthread.php?t=11284
I">[url]http://www.directorforum.de/showthread.php?t=11284[/url]
I</a> tend to chop his work up and poke it into my stuff.

You may be going for something a little more like the follow link. It's in
progress so the instructions are missing. left click drag to rotate, right
click to pan, click both mouse buttons and drag vertically to zoom.
<a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge
href="http://www.stuffycorporatedesign.com/open/ss.htm">[url]http://www.stuffycorpora[/url]
tedesign.com/open/ss.htm</a>

[Wriker]

Thanks. The magic word I was looking for is "interpolate", but bezier
calculations is even better because it gives you the option to add several
"waypoints" in your trajectory.

Nice galaxy, by the way. :-)

[Roofy]

[q]Originally posted by: Paulygon
[url]http://www.stuffycorporatedesign.com/open/ss.htm[/url][/q]

I know this post is old, but you would not have the script for this would ya?
I ask this because, I am trrying to orbit my camera arround an object and I am
not getting the results as in the above shockwave 3d demo.

I am have tried rotating with the below method but it causes the camera to fly
all over the place...
pCamera.rotate(dx, dy, 0, sprite(me.spriteNum).member.model("box"))

... where dx dy are the rotation angles that I have calculated from where the
mouse is located