"Looking At" an object with a Quaternion

Question

So I am currently trying to create a function that will take two 3D points A and B, and provide me with the quaternion representing the rotation required of point A to be "looking at" point B (such that point A's local Z axis passes through point B, if you will).

I originally found this post, the top answer of which seemed to provide me with a good starting point. I went on to implement the following code; instead of assuming a default (0, 0, -1) orientation, as the original answer suggests, I try to extract a unit vector representing the actual orientation of the camera.

void Camera::LookAt(sf::Vector3<float> Target)
{
    ///Derived from pseudocode found here:
    ///https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13014973/quaternion-rotate-to

    //Get the normalized vector from the camera position to Target
    sf::Vector3<float> VectorTo(Target.x - m_Position.x,
                                Target.y - m_Position.y,
                                Target.z - m_Position.z);
    //Get the length of VectorTo
    float VectorLength = sqrt(VectorTo.x*VectorTo.x +
                              VectorTo.y*VectorTo.y +
                              VectorTo.z*VectorTo.z);
    //Normalize VectorTo
    VectorTo.x /= VectorLength;
    VectorTo.y /= VectorLength;
    VectorTo.z /= VectorLength;

    //Straight-ahead vector
    sf::Vector3<float> LocalVector = m_Orientation.MultVect(sf::Vector3<float>(0, 0, -1));

    //Get the cross product as the axis of rotation
    sf::Vector3<float> Axis(VectorTo.y*LocalVector.z - VectorTo.z*LocalVector.y,
                            VectorTo.z*LocalVector.x - VectorTo.x*LocalVector.z,
                            VectorTo.x*LocalVector.y - VectorTo.y*LocalVector.x);

    //Get the dot product to find the angle
    float Angle = acos(VectorTo.x*LocalVector.x +
                       VectorTo.y*LocalVector.y +
                       VectorTo.z*LocalVector.z);

    //Determine whether or not the angle is positive
    //Get the cross product of the axis and the local vector
    sf::Vector3<float> ThirdVect(Axis.y*LocalVector.z - Axis.z*LocalVector.y,
                                 Axis.z*LocalVector.x - Axis.x*LocalVector.z,
                                 Axis.x*LocalVector.y - Axis.y*LocalVector.x);
    //If the dot product of that and the local vector is negative, so is the angle
    if (ThirdVect.x*VectorTo.x + ThirdVect.y*VectorTo.y + ThirdVect.z*VectorTo.z < 0)
    {
        Angle = -Angle;
    }

    //Finally, create a quaternion
    Quaternion AxisAngle;
    AxisAngle.FromAxisAngle(Angle, Axis.x, Axis.y, Axis.z);

    //And multiply it into the current orientation
    m_Orientation = AxisAngle * m_Orientation;
}

This almost works. What happens is that the camera seems to rotate half the distance towards the Target point. If I attempt the rotation again, it performs half the remaining rotation, ad infinitum, such that if I hold down the "Look-At-Button", the camera's orientation gets closer and closer to looking directly at the target, but is also constantly slowing down in its rotation, such that it never quite gets there.

Note that I don't want to resort to gluLookAt(), as I will also eventually need this code to point objects other than the camera at one another, and my objects already use quaternions for their orientations. For example, I might want to create an eyeball that tracks the position of something moving around in front of it, or a projectile that updates its orientation to seek out its target.

Answer 1

Normalize Axis vector before passing it to FromAxisAngle.

Answer 2

Why are you using a quaternion? You're just making things more complex and requiring more computation in this instance. To set up a matrix:-

calculate vector from observer to observed (which you're doing already)
normalise it (again, doing it already) = at
cross product this with the observer's up direction = right
normalise right
cross product at and right to get up

and you're done. The right, up and at vectors are the first, second and third row (or column, depending on how you set things up) of your matrix. The final row/column is the objects position.

But it looks like you want to transform an existing matrix to this new matrix over several frames. SLERPs do this to matricies as well as quaternions (which isn't surprising when you look into the maths). For the transformation, store the initial and target matricies and then SLERP between them, changing the amount to SLERP by each frame (e.g. 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1.0 - although a non-linear progression would look nicer).

Don't forget that you're converting a quaternion back into a matrix in order to pass it to the rendering pipeline (unless there's some new features in the shaders to handle quaternions natively). So any efficencies due to quaternion use has to take into account the conversion process as well.