Make lookAt work with the scenegraph?

As it is lookAt says it doesn’t work if the object you’re calling it for has parents etc… I was wondering what you all think about removing that restriction. My guess is most projects only call lookAt at most once a frame to aim the camera so making it a little heavier is not likely to affect performance since it’s not the kind of function to be called 1000s of times a frame.

On the other hand, making it more flexible makes it more useful for things like pointing a character’s head at an object of interest. Pointing a security camera what what it’s tracking. Pointing a gun turret at it’s target.

Thoughts?

Here’s a sample

https://jsfiddle.net/greggman/7gdux2ch/

and a preliminary pull request below

[greggman]

I’m just going by pretty much every other 3D engine except three.js. There’s matrix lookAt which is of course the standard function. Then there’s scene graph lookAt which in 3DSMax, Maya, Unity, Unreal, and most other engines do take the position in the scene graph into account. It really doesn’t seem to make sense for scene graph functions not to work with the scene graph. In other words. THREE.Matrix4.lookAt deals with matrices. THREE.Object3D.lookAt deals with the scene graph. So you already have 2 functions, one for each case.

[WestLangley]

any progress on this?

#14517 has been available for a month. See if it works for you.