change the distance of a 3dObject from another 3Object in threejs

Question

Is there any way to change the distance of the camera from a fixed 3Object in threejs?

There is a "Vector3.distanceTo(Vector3)" function that gives you the distance of two 3d objects but I couldn't find anything that changes the distance.

Answer 1

There is no function that can do this for you. If you want to change the position of a 3D object, you have to translate it by modifying its position property.

Assuming you want to keep the directon between both 3D objects, you can implement the code like so:

const a = new THREE.Object3D();
a.position.set(0, 0, 0);

const b = new THREE.Object3D();
b.position.set(0, 0, 1);

console.log(a.position.distanceTo(b.position)); // 1

// move object "b" 2 additional world unit away from object "a"

const direction = new THREE.Vector3();
direction.subVectors(b.position, a.position).normalize();

const offset = new THREE.Vector3();
offset.copy(direction).multiplyScalar(2);

b.position.add(offset);

console.log(a.position.distanceTo(b.position)); // 3

body {
    margin: 0;
}

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/three@0.141/build/three.min.js"></script>

This code snippet assume both 3D objects have no ancestors nodes.