I’ll make this simple to understand:
- Create a “Free Camera”
- Open MaxScript Listener
- In the Modify tab of max, change your target distance to another number (example 6.506″).
Your MaxScript Listener will display in the pink zone:
$.targetDistance = 6.50628
But if you type:
$.targetDistance
You will recieve:
undefined
My question is, why does targetDistance respond with undefined? If I type in other properties like .fov, I get the correct response of 45.0. But .targetDistance is undefined, why??
a free cam don’t have any target
edit: if u want a target cam, u should use this
[b][b]targetCamera
[/b][/b]
That’s not to say that a freeCamera doesn’t have a target distance property; in fact, manipulating that value in a freeCamera allows you to control the reach of the view frustrum in the viewports, for example – and the Depth of Field by default uses the target distance as well.
Which doesn’t answer the original question, but…
$
$Free_Camera:Camera01 @ [37.269371,0.000001,-26.199263]
$.targetDistance
undefined
$.targetDistance = 10
10 [color=Green]-- but it's not actually set to 10
[/color]$.target_distance -- subAnim value accessor
96.0 [color=Green]-- see?
[/color]$.target_distance = 10
10
$.target_distance
10.0 -- now it is
No idea why .targetDistance returns undefined and can’t be set, though; I do suspect it’s related to the freeCamera vs targetCamera thing (as you can’t particularly set it when you are using an actual target), but that’s just a wild guess.
DIRECT QUOTE FROM THE HELP:
[left][b][b]NOTE:[/b][/b]
[/left]
[left]In 3ds Max, all node-level properties are searched before base-object-level properties. If a base-object property has the same name as a node-level property, you need to search in the base object for the base object property.
[/left]
[left]This affects the following properties of freeCamera:
[/left]
[left]
[/left]
[left]<freeCamera>.baseObject.targetDistance
[/left]
[left]Get/Set the target distance of the Free Camera.
[/left]
[left]Every node in 3ds Max has a node property .targetDistance which contains the distance to an eventual target the node is looking at using a LookAt controller. (you can assign a node to the .lookAt property and the controller will be assigned automatically).
[/left]
[left]Thus, a Free Camera has such a node property but it is set to undefined, and a baseobject property with the same name which contains the actual target distance value shown in the User Interface. If the Free Camera gets converted to a Target camera, the node-level property will be displayed in the User Interface and should be accessed via MAXScript.
[/left]
well, that explains that :>
/me tells self to rtfm