programmatic control of camera?

[NoveltyEngine]

Hi.

I want to prototype a device where a camera is an end-effector inside of PyMadCAD. To do so, I need to be able to programmatically control the camera position and view-target. Is this possible?

Also, as a tangential use of the same thing, I'd like to, for some objects, set up camera angles to capture pictures of the 3d object, for kind of a visual version history tracking.

[NoveltyEngine]

If I could have many view windows open, that would be cool. I'd like to have realtime views of top, left, right, whatever - each of them individually positionable or programmatically controllable.

[jimy-byerley]

All this is definitely possible and not that hard, in fact I already did it in other projects using pymadcad (closed source project unfortunately so i cannot share this code)

to have multiple views, you can create a Qt window my usual means and instantiate multiple madcad.rendering.QView3D with navigation=None and projection set to mimic your camera instrinsics
if you want to capture images from the 3d scene without a widget view, you can use madcad.rendering.Offscreen3D instead and retreive images with its .render() method, providing view matrix for camera placement and proj matrix for camera intrinsics

for moving your device into the 3d scene, just set its display position (between renderings if offscreen, or every tick of a QTimer if using views) you will need to call QView3D.update() after every move to refresh the widget views

Also if your device to move is a robot arm or some kind of mechanism, you can model it using madcad.kinematic (or even use standard kinematics in madcad.standard) to place easily all parts automatically

[jimy-byerley]

Tell me if you need examples ;)

[NoveltyEngine]

Awesome, thank you very much. I'm making progress with the info you shared.

I've finished basic camera control. I haven't done kinematics or multiple view windows yet.

[jimy-byerley]

Good news !