Third person camera

Scripting Issues
1

Hi everyone,

I am new to Panda3D and I need some help. I want to set up a third person camera. Maybe I’m getting in way over my head, but I really want to give it a try. I looked around the forums already, but I couldn’t find a topic about exactly what I’m looking for. Here is what the camera should do:

Stay in a position behind the character at all times
When the mouse moves along the x axis, the camera will rotate to adjust the view (because the character will also be turning to face the mouse’s direction)
When the mouse moves along the y axis, the camera will turn upwards or downwards to adjust the view.

The effect will be a third person camera like in the games Oblivion or Gears of War. Is there a Panda3D function for this? If I have to code it myself, could someone please tell me how? Thanks in advance.

2

Welcome :smiley:.

You don’t have to code it yourself from scratch, it’s been done. Like in this example:

discourse.panda3d.org/viewtopic.php … ming+ralph

You may want to start with the tutorials in the samples folder that comes with Panda and read the manual first. Good luck.

3

Thanks kayn! I’ll take your advice and work with the sample programs.

4

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention; if you’re not familiar with Python you should definitely learn it.

There are a bunch of tutorials, books, etc. all over the internet (and libraries). What I used to get started was:

docs.python.org/tut/tut.html

Reading through that and doing the tutorials should help you understand the basics. The hard part is using that knowledge in Panda (for me at least).

5

Kayn, the tutorial you linked to is quite old, for Python 2.0.

The updated tutorial is here:

docs.python.org/tut/tut.html

6

Oops, sorry. I have the different versions bookmarked, and that was one of my earlier ones (maybe my first). I can be an idiot sometimes.

7

Really? I tried the old tutorial and it worked perfectly and was exactly what I needed. But I’ll try the new tutorial instead since it’s more up to date. Thanks Arkaein, and thanks again kayn.

Edit: Oops, I thought when you said “tutorial” you meant the third person camera topic. Now I see that you meant the Python tutorials. Sorry for the mixup.

As for learning Python, it’s not hard for me so far. I have about three years experience with C++ and Python has a lot of similarities.