I’m working on making a 3rd person camera (in lwjgl) and I simply cannot get the math concepts straight in my head. I’ve worked through the positioning stuff in the arcsynthesis tutorials but I’m still having some trouble thinking in quaternions. I really don’t like Euler angles (yaw, pitch, roll) so I’d like to stay away from them.
Right now I have a player class that has its own camera object as well as player position and camera target vectors and an orientation quaternion. I can update the player’s orientation with a quat but I’m having trouble figuring out how to move the camera’s target and position properly.
Should that be done with quats/position vectors as in the left half of my pic? Would it be better to do it with a pair of spherical position vectors like in the right? And if so, isn’t that subject to gimbal lock?
I’m using an offset target point so as to avoid the irritating player-always-in-the-way effect like in minecraft.
https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn2/8568_576037255774651_205518275_n.jpg
Please and Thank you for the help