How do I figure out the magic numbers to plug into the orientation field of a Viewpoint node to make the camera point to where I want it?
Here are two answers. The first is for people who want to understand the “magic numbers”. The first three numbers in the orientation field are a vector that describes which way up is. But wait a minute; three numbers describe a point; how can they describe a vector? Easy. The other point in the vector is the origin (0,0,0). The vector is nominally a unit vector, but I don’t know of any VRML browser that complains if the length of the vector isn’t 1. The fourth number is the rotation about that vector, using the right-hand rule (point your right thumb along the line from the origin to the point you described with the first three numbers, and the direction your fingers curl is a positive angle). The second answer is for people who don’t remember their high school math. Instead of figuring out what the numbers mean, use Stephen Chenney’s orient (C source code and Win95 executable). Some object modelers and scene modelers will let you fly your camera to a point in the scene, orient your vi
