## Our camera matrix

As discussed at the end of the last one, the vertices of a model must be transformed by the model-view-perspective, or camera, matrix to place them in clip space.

What information do we need to generate the camera matrix?

• the rotation of the model
• the displacement of the model from the origin
• the rotation of the camera
• the displacement of the camera from the origin
• parameters to define the perspective matrix, which with GLM, consist of:
• the vertical field of view in radians
• the aspect ratio
• the distance to the near clipping plane
• the distance to the far clipping plane

As it happens the example code for GLM involves calculating a camera matrix. So let’s have a look at how they do it.

This doesn’t allow an arbitrary camera direction, but rather requires that it’s pointed at the origin.

The function effectively takes three float parameters: the distance the camera is moved from the origin, and two angles to determine the direction from the origin.

First, it generates a perspective projection matrix with a 45 degree vertical FOV, a 4:3 aspect ratio, a near clipping plane at distance 0.1, and a far clipping plane at distance 100.

Then it generates a translation matrix to move everything in the -z direction by the amount Translate, equivalent to moving the camera by Translate in the +z direction. The openGL perspective projection matrix assumes the camera is pointing in the -z direction, which is exactly what we want. Note that the GLM functions don’t simply generate a matrix, but apply the translation to an existing matrix - in this case, the identity matrix.

Next, it rotates this matrix around the x axis, and then the y axis. Since this rotation is applied after the translation, this in effect moves the camera around the origin as well as changing which way it is pointing.

Finally, a model matrix is generated. In this example, it simply downscales the model to half the size.

For the return value, the three matrices are multiplied together in an order such that the model matrix is applied, then the view matrix, then the perspective projection matrix.

What about my rasteriser? To be fully general, I would need to rotate the model and camera arbitrarily, translate them in an arbitrary direction, and take arbitrary parameters for the perspective matrix. That’s probably overkill - we can write a more general algorithm later. Instead, let’s have the camera orbit the geometry at a fixed distance, and we’ll just use hardcoded numbers for the parameters. So all we need is the angle.

The function will follow basically the same lines as the example, but we don’t need a model matrix, nor am I going to rotate the camera around the y axis. For clarity, I’m initialising the view matrix as an identity matrix, and the compiler will handle optimising this.

## Let’s check it works

I’ll add a simple function to print out the values of a mat4, so we can make sure we’re getting the kind of matrix we expect.

GLM matrices are indexed first by selecting a column, then a row, as in the OpenGL Shader Language. This is, confusingly, opposite the order we index matrices in mathematical writing. In other words, matrix[j][i] in code refers to matrix component $$M_ij$$.

So a simple function to print a matrix to the standard output (I tried to do it to an arbitrary output stream but apparently passing cout as an ostream reference isn’t the right way to do it):

Then I inserted it in a bunch of points in the matrix calculation.

Result for one radian rotation:

The first of these is recognisably a perspective matrix - the last row being 0,0,-1,0 is a dead giveaway since that puts a vertex’s z coordinate into its w coordinate. The other parameters all look plausible.

The second is clearly a translation matrix, just as ordered. And the third is the product of a translation matrix with a rotation matrix. (I can’t tell if the matrix is correct for one radian of rotation just by looking, but it looks plausible). Perfect :)

For completeness, when we multiply those matrices together, we get this matrix:

The next step is to transform the coordinates into clip space. This can be done by multiplying each point by the camera matrix.

(Though this isn’t really a lot of progress today, I got pretty distracted, and I kind of need to stop now. Tomorrow, though, I hope I can write the actual shading code.)