Question

I have a camera with the coordinates x,y at height h that is looking onto the x-y-plane at a specific angle, with a specific field of view. I want to calculate the 4 corners the camera can see on the plane.

There is probably some kind of formula for that, but I can’t seem to find it on google.

Edit: I should probably mention that I mean a camera in the 3D-Graphics sense. Specifically I’m using XNA.

Answer 1

I’ve had to do similar things for debugging graphics code in 3D games. I found the easiest way of thinking about it was creating the vectors representing the corners of the screen and then calculating the intersection with whatever relevant objects (in this case, a plane).

Take a look at your view-projection (or whatever your Camera’s matrix stack looks like multiplied together) and realize the screen space they output to has corners with homogonized coordinates of (-1, -1), (-1, 1), (1, -1), (1, 1). Knowing this, you’re left with one free variable and can solve for the vector representing the corner of the camera.

Although, this is a pain. It’s much easier to construct a vector for each corner as if the camera isn’t rotated or translated and then transform them by the view matrix to give you world space vectors. Then you can calculate the intersection between the vectors and the plane to get your four corners.

I have a day job, so I leave the math to you. Some links that may help with that, however:

Angle/Field of view calculations

Line plane intersection