Just having a quick look at this. Does anyone have any suggestions for the best way to set the Roll property via script? My first thought was do a rotation in the z axis of the camera, but I wondered if the look-at constraint would cause problems?
hmmm this actually isn’t as simple as I thought. What I want to do is insert a spinner in a dialogue which mimics the roll spinner on the transform popup for cameras.
This seems to be based on an absolute rotation about the local z axis – but how is the zero position defined.
Any ideas anyone??
Ah…found it:
camera.controller.roll_angle
but the LookAt Controller appears to be obsolete in the help file! (so what’s it doing on a default scene node eh??)
That is the original look at controller before look at constraints.
Hi Paul,
That’s why I couldn’t find it – I looked at that first and it said it was obsolete, and the new constraint doesn’t have the roll_angle property. I was surprised that the obsolete controller was applied by default to the camera object.
Yes, it is used internally a lot.
Even in MAXScript:
b = Box()
t = targetObject pos:[100,100,100]
b.target = t
The old LookAt is really useful for this stuff because it allows for only one target. So for a camera, it is the perfect controller. And it is assigned automatically when you create a target camera, so why replace with the new one?
Will add a note that why obsolete, it is still being created automatically for targeted Cameras, Lights and Helpers.