How do I rotate an OpenGL view relative to the center of the view as opposed to the center of the object being displayed?

Question

I'm working on a fork of Pleasant3D.

When rotating an object being displayed the object always rotates around the same point relative to to itself even if that point is not at the center of the view (e.g. because the user has panned to move the object in the view).

I would like to change this so that the view always rotates the object around the point at the center of the view as it appears to the user instead of the center of the object.

Here is the core of the current code that rotates the object around its center (slightly simplified) (from here):

glLoadIdentity(); 

// midPlatform is the offset to reach the "middle" of the object (or more specifically the platform on which the object sits) in the x/y dimension.
// This the point around which the view is currently rotated.
Vector3 *midPlatform = [self.currentMachine calcMidBuildPlatform];
glTranslatef((GLfloat)cameraTranslateX - midPlatform.x, 
             (GLfloat)cameraTranslateY - midPlatform.y, 
             (GLfloat)cameraOffset);

// trackBallRotation and worldRotation come from trackball.h/c which appears to be
// from an Apple OpenGL sample.
if (trackBallRotation[0] != 0.0f) {
  glRotatef (trackBallRotation[0], trackBallRotation[1], trackBallRotation[2], trackBallRotation[3]);
}
// accumlated world rotation via trackball
glRotatef (worldRotation[0], worldRotation[1], worldRotation[2], worldRotation[3]);

glTranslatef(midPlatform.x, midPlatform.y, 0.);

// Now draw object...

What transformations do I need to apply in what order to get the effect I desire?

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Some of what I've tried so far

As I understand it this is what the current code does:

"OpenGL performs matrices multiplications in reverse order if multiple transforms are applied to a vertex" (from here). This means that the first transformation to be applied is actually the last one in the code above. It moves the center of the view (0,0) to the center of the object.

This point is then used as the center of rotation for the next two transformations (the rotations).

Finally the midPlatform translation is done in reverse to move the center back to the original location and the XY translations (panning) done by the user is applied. Here also the "camera" is moved away from the object to the proper location (indicated by cameraOffset).

This seems straightforward enough. So what I need to change is instead of translating the center of the view to the center of the object (midPlatform) I need to translate it to the current center of the view as seen by the user, right?

Unfortunately this is where the transformations start affecting each other in interesting ways and I am running into trouble.

I tried changing the code to this:

glLoadIdentity(); 

glTranslatef(0, 
             0, 
             (GLfloat)cameraOffset);

if (trackBallRotation[0] != 0.0f) {
    glRotatef (trackBallRotation[0], trackBallRotation[1], trackBallRotation[2], trackBallRotation[3]);
}
// accumlated world rotation via trackball
glRotatef (worldRotation[0], worldRotation[1], worldRotation[2], worldRotation[3]);

glTranslatef(cameraTranslateX, cameraTranslateY, 0.);

In other words, I translate the center of the view to the previous center, rotate around that, and then apply the camera offset to move the camera away to the proper position. This makes the rotation behave exactly the way I want it to, but it introduces a new issue. Now any panning done by the user is relative to the object. For example if the object is rotated so that the camera is looking along the X axis end-on, if the user pans left to right the object appears to be moving closer/further from the user instead of left or right.

I think I can understand why the is (XY camera translations being applied before rotation), and I think what I need to do is figure out a way to cancel out the translation from before the rotation after the rotation (to avoid the weird panning effect) and then to do another translation which translates relative to the viewer (eye coordinate space) instead of the object (object coordinate space) but I'm not sure exactly how to do this.

I found what I think are some clues in the OpenGL FAQ(http://www.opengl.org/resources/faq/technical/transformations.htm), for example:

9.070 How do I transform my objects around a fixed coordinate system rather than the object's local coordinate system?

If you rotate an object around its Y-axis, you'll find that the X- and Z-axes rotate with the object. A subsequent rotation around one of these axes rotates around the newly transformed axis and not the original axis. It's often desirable to perform transformations in a fixed coordinate system rather than the object’s local coordinate system.

The root cause of the problem is that OpenGL matrix operations postmultiply onto the matrix stack, thus causing transformations to occur in object space. To affect screen space transformations, you need to premultiply. OpenGL doesn't provide a mode switch for the order of matrix multiplication, so you need to premultiply by hand. An application might implement this by retrieving the current matrix after each frame. The application multiplies new transformations for the next frame on top of an identity matrix and multiplies the accumulated current transformations (from the last frame) onto those transformations using glMultMatrix().

You need to be aware that retrieving the ModelView matrix once per frame might have a detrimental impact on your application’s performance. However, you need to benchmark this operation, because the performance will vary from one implementation to the next.

And

9.120 How do I find the coordinates of a vertex transformed only by the ModelView matrix?

It's often useful to obtain the eye coordinate space value of a vertex (i.e., the object space vertex transformed by the ModelView matrix). You can obtain this by retrieving the current ModelView matrix and performing simple vector / matrix multiplication.

But I'm not sure how to apply these in my situation.

Answer 1

You need to transform/translate "center of view" point into origin, rotate, then invert that translation, back to the object's transform. This is known as a basis change in linear algebra.

This is way easier to work with if you have a proper 3d-math library (I'm assuming you do have one), and that also helps to to stay far from the deprecated fixed-pipeline APIs. (more on that later).

Here's how I'd do it:

1. Find the transform for the center of view point in world coordinates (figure it out, then draw it to make sure it's correct, with x,y,z axis too, since the axii are supposed to be correct w.r.t. the view). If you use the center-of-view point and the rotation (usually the inverse of the camera's rotation), this will be a transform from world origin to the view center. Store this in a 4x4 matrix transform.

2. Apply the inverse of the above transform, so that it becomes the origin. glMultMatrixfv(center_of_view_tf.inverse());

3. Rotate about this point however you want (glRotate())

4. Transform everything back to world space (glMultMatrixfv(center_of_view_tf);)

5. Apply object's own world transform (glTranslate/glRotate or glMultMatrix) and draw it.

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About the fixed function pipeline

Back in the old days, there were separate transistors for transforming a vertex (or it's texture coordinates), computing where light was in relation to it applying lights (up to 8) and texturing fragments in many different ways. Simply, glEnable(), enabled fixed blocks of silicon to do some computation in the hardware graphics pipeline. As performance grew, die sized shrunk and people demanded more features, the amount of dedicated silicon grew too, and much of it wasn't used.

Eventually, it got so advanced that you could program it in rather obscene ways (register combiners anyone). And then, it became feasible to actually upload a small assembler program for all vertex-level transforms. Then, it made to sense to keep a lot of silicon there that just did one thing (especially as you could've used those transistors to make the programmable stuff faster), so everything became programmable. If "fixed function" rendering was called for, the driver just converted the state (X lights, texture projections, etc) to shader code and uploaded that as a vertex shader.

So, currently, where even the fragment processing is programmable, there is just a lot of fixed-function options that is used by tons and tons of OpenGL applications, but the silicon on the GPU just runs shaders (and lots of it, in parallell).

...

To make OpenGL more efficient, and the drivers less bulky, and the hardware simpler and useable on mobile/console devices and to take full advantage of the programmable hardware that OpenGL runs on these days, many functions in the API are now marked deprecated. They are not available on OpenGL ES 2.0 and beyond (mobile) and you won't be getting the best performance out of them even on desktop systems (where they will still be in the driver for ages to come, serving equally ancient code bases originating back to the dawn of accelerated 3d graphics)

The fixed-functionness mostly concerns how transforms/lighting/texturing etc. are done by "default" in OpenGL (i.e. glEnable(GL_LIGHTING)), instead of you specifying these ops in your custom shaders.

In the new, programmable, OpenGL, transform matrices are just uniforms in the shader. Any rotate/translate/mult/inverse (like the above) should be done by client code (your code) before being uploaded to OpenGL. (Using only glLoadMatrix is one way to start thinking about it, but instead of using gl_ModelViewProjectionMatrix and the ilk in your shader, use your own uniforms.)

It's a bit of a bother, since you have to implement quite a bit of what was done by the GL driver before, but if you have your own object list/graph with transforms and a transform somewhere etc, it's not that much work. (OTOH, if you have a lot of glTranslate/glRotate in your code, it might be...). As I said, a good 3d-math library is indispensable here.

-..

So, to change the above code to "programmable pipeline" style, you'd just do all these matrix multiplications in your own code (instead of the GL driver doing it, still on the CPU) and then send the resulting matrix to opengl as a uniform before you activate the shaders and draw your object from VBOs.

(Note that modern cards do not have fixed-function code, just a lot of code in the driver to compile fixed-function rendering state to a shader that does the job. No wonder "classic" GL drivers are huge...)

...

Some info about this process is available at Tom's Hardware Guide and probably Google too.