How to customize the Camera Manipulation

There are multiple camera manipulation modes built in the engine's CameraManipulator. Turntable, Tumbler and Trackball are distinct modes for orbiting the camera around a model or point of focus.

Changing the Camera Manipulation Mode

These different modes of camera manipulation are built into Zea Engine, you can change the mode by doing the following:

const manipulationMode = CameraManipulator.MANIPULATION_MODES.tumbler// const manipulationMode = CameraManipulator.MANIPULATION_MODES.turntable// const manipulationMode = CameraManipulator.MANIPULATION_MODES.trackball
renderer.getViewport().getManipulator().setDefaultManipulationMode(manipulationMode)

If you want to understand more about how these various modes of orbiting differ, please check out Matt Keeter's explanation.

Turntable

This mode is mostly recommended when the model has an associated real world axis; but the down side of it is that you can't freely rotate the camera. Left and right rotate around the global Z axis and Up and Down rotate around the local X axis.

Tumbler

This mode lets you freely rotate the camera around the axes, contrary to the Turntable mode, but it causes the model tumble when moving the mouse in small circles while moving to the desired position, which end up in undesired rotations.

Trackball

Projects a ball towards onto the model and when the pointer is down, the position in the ball is grabbed and used to calculate the rotation, but you can only rotate it a maximum of 180º.