@zkmake/three-cameras

A dev panel for the cameras in a three.js scene. It lists every camera: the ones in the scene graph, and the one the renderer draws with even when it isn’t in the scene (R3F’s default camera, most vanilla apps’ main camera). It marks which cameras are drawing right now and how often, reads each one’s position and projection live, and draws a camera’s frustum in the scene.

Pick a camera and you control it: edit its position, rotation and lens by typing or scrubbing, look through it in place of the app’s main view, copy its setup as code, and save views to fly back to. Animate cameras on a keyframe timeline: key a camera, retime and ease its keys, and play the move back in the running scene, shaping them in a graph editor and an ease curve editor, with the motion path drawn in the scene.

It’s one panel, anchored across the bottom of the screen: the camera list as the timeline’s left sidebar, each camera’s row beside its key lane. Collapsed, it’s a small widget with the picked camera (its kind, name, and whether it’s live or looked through); click it to expand.

bun add -d @zkmake/three-cameras   # or npm i -D / yarn add -D / pnpm add -D

Live demo: three-kit.pages.dev/three-cameras, with a vanilla three and a React Three Fiber take on the same set: an orbit view, a dolly camera circling the set and drawing a picture-in-picture inset, an overhead orthographic camera and a security camera.

Vanilla three

import { mountCameraPanel } from "@zkmake/three-cameras/ui";

const panel = mountCameraPanel({ scene, renderer });
// later: panel.dispose()

React Three Fiber

import { CameraPanel } from "@zkmake/three-cameras/react";

<Canvas>
  <CameraPanel />
</Canvas>;

It reads the scene and renderer from the canvas, so the canvas’s camera shows as live, and asks for a frame after a frustum toggles, so frameloop="demand" works.

What each row shows

Rows are named by the cameras option, else the camera’s name, else its kind (perspective camera 2). Name your cameras and the panel reads better.

Controlling a camera

Pick a row (click its name) and it opens into the camera’s controls:

• Position and rotation, its own (relative to its parent), rotation in degrees, and lens: fov, near, far and zoom. Type a value, or drag a field’s label to scrub it: Shift for fine steps, Alt for coarse. An app that sets the camera every frame wins on its next frame.
• Copy as code: three.js that sets the camera up as it is now, named after the camera.
• Save view: keeps where it is and how it projects. Click a saved view to fly back to it (eased over 0.8 s); the docked panel keeps them in localStorage, by camera name.
• A readout of what isn’t edited here: world position, aspect, frame rate, where it sits.

Look through swaps a camera into the app’s main view: the view drawing the most of the screen, so a picture-in-picture inset or a render target keeps its own camera. The camera is fitted to that view’s aspect for the frame and put back after, and the app’s camera is left where it was. A banner shows what you’re looking through, with a way back.

The timeline

The timeline animates cameras with keyframes. Its left column is the camera list: each camera’s row sits beside its lane, and a row opened into its controls stretches its lane to match.

• Key the picked camera as it is now at the playhead, or double-click its lane to key it there. A key holds its position, rotation and lens.
• Drag a key to retime it (snaps to 0.1 s; Shift for free). Click one to inspect it: its time, its ease into the next key (ease in-out, linear, ease in, ease out, or hold), Update to re-key it from the camera as it is now, and Delete.
• Play, pause (Space), scrub the ruler, loop, and set the length. The camera travels a smooth curve through its keys, turns evenly between them, and its lens eases too.
• Once you play or scrub, tracked cameras are held to their tracks right before each frame, so a track wins over an app that moves the camera itself. Edit a camera and it’s let go, so the edit sticks until you key it; stop lets every camera go back to the app.
• Look through a camera while it plays to see the shot. Tracks are kept in localStorage, by camera name. Pass timeline: false for the camera list alone.

Shaping a move

• Ease curve: the key inspector draws the move from the picked key to the next as a curve of progress over time, with two handles (CSS cubic-bezier terms). Drag a handle to reshape it: a preset becomes a custom curve from the preset’s shape. Handles go above 1 or below 0 for overshoot and anticipation.
• Graph: switch the timeline to Graph for the picked camera’s channels over time: position x, y, z, rotation x, y, z (degrees), fov or zoom, near and far, drawn as the track plays them. Drag a key’s dot up or down to change that value (Shift for fine), or sideways to retime the key. Click between keys to pick that segment’s ease; double-click to add a key. Channels are stretched to their own ranges; “values” puts them on one scale.

Motion paths in the scene

A camera that moves shows its path in the scene by itself, while it moves (cameras in the scene; your own view camera is left out):

• Keyed cameras show their track, an amber curve with a white dot per key. Drag a dot in the scene to move that key: it slides on a plane facing you, Shift for straight up or down. The path and the move reshape as you drag, and the press doesn’t reach orbit controls.
• App-driven cameras (moved by your code, not keys) show where they’ve been over the last 8 seconds, a light blue line. Your code drives that move, so it can’t be dragged; Bake to keys in the camera’s controls turns it into keys (one where the path bends, linear timing), and it’s a track to edit like any other. Played, the track takes over from the app.
• The path toggle on a camera’s row shows or hides its path by hand.

How it finds cameras

• The scene graph: anything with isCamera under scene. A CubeCamera is one row; its six face cameras aren’t listed.
• The renderer: the lab wraps renderer.render on the instance and notes every camera it’s handed. A camera the scene doesn’t hold gets a row on its first frame and stays while it keeps drawing (a few seconds after it stops). Post-processing that calls renderer.render counts too.

dispose() puts render back, unless something wrapped it after the panel did, in which case the panel’s wrapper stays in place and just passes through.

Options

The engine

CameraLab is the panel’s engine, with no DOM, for scripting or a panel of your own:

import { CameraLab, writeChannel } from "@zkmake/three-cameras";
import { Vector3 } from "three";
import { createCameraPanel } from "@zkmake/three-cameras/ui";

const lab = new CameraLab({ scene, renderer });

lab.entries(); // [{ id, kind, camera, inScene, live, fps, helper, viewing, views, … }]
lab.details("dolly"); // { position, rotation, local: { position, rotation }, projection }
lab.set("dolly", { fov: 30, position: [0, 2, 8] });
lab.lookThrough("dolly"); // null to go back
lab.setHelper("dolly", true);

const home = lab.saveView("dolly", "home");
lab.goToView("dolly", home.id, { duration: 800 });

lab.addKey("dolly", { time: 0 }); // the camera as it is now
lab.addKey("dolly", { time: 4, ease: "ease-out" });
lab.play(); // pause(), seek(2), stop(), setLoop(false), setDuration(12)

const [first] = lab.keys("dolly");
lab.updateKey("dolly", first.id, { bezier: [0.3, 1.4, 0.6, 1] }); // overshoot
lab.updateKey("dolly", first.id, { pose: writeChannel(first.pose, "fov", 30) });
lab.setTrail("dolly", true); // or false, or "auto" (the default)
lab.bakeMotion("dolly"); // its recorded move as keys
lab.moveKeyTo("dolly", home.id, new Vector3(0, 3, 8)); // a key to a world point

tab.append(createCameraPanel(lab).element); // the bare panel, for a host with its own tabs

The dev-panel frame

It sits in three-meter’s mountDevPanel, so it compacts and dims like the three-meter HUD and the three-textures panel, with its brand label on top. With the timeline it’s anchored across the bottom (no drag grip); the list alone drags and snaps to an edge like the others.

License

MIT