Creating a camera that overviews a Papervision3D Scene

Question

When first setting and subsequently experimenting with a Papervison3D scene, I often find myself lost because I somehow get the camera not looking at the scene geometry. If I don't realize that's the problem, then I start trying to find out why my scene isn't rendering - d'oh!

Is there a best practice for setting up a camera that overviews the whole scene so that you can see where everything is? I'm thinking of something like an isometric top-down view of the full scene extents - kinda like you'd see in a 3D package.

Answer 1

This is one of the many tricky things in setting up a scene in Papervision. I usually start by setting the camera to org.papervision3d.cameras.DebugCamera3D. This is basically the exact same as Camera3D, but shows all the rotation, zoom, focus - all that good stuff - in a debug window on top of your scene. The keyboard is also activated with a bunch of shortcuts (look in the .as file for these) where you can manually move around and see the effect on your scene (just make sure to select "Control > Disable Keyboard Shortcuts" when debugging your movie . I've found it extremely helpful for those "oh, my scene is over there!" moments.