Is the play scene unusable in 3D scenes without camera?

aXu_AP

I have recently started experimenting in 3D side of Godot, and one thing bugs me: if there's no camera in scene, play scene (F6) results in a gray screen. So no way to test character etc. scenes in isolation like in 2D. If I'm not mistaken, in Godot 4, it seems even harder: you also need environment or lights to see something.

I love how accessible Godot 2D is, usually you need to put things in and hit play to see some results. What could be done? Maybe use editor's camera position ingame if camera doesn't exist in scene. Same goes for environment. This could be an option in debug menu (use default environment). One could go a step further and set a default scene which will be loaded on play scene. There could be a floor for example.

What do you think? I consider making this a proposal, but first I wanted to get some feedback on this.

Megalomaniak

If you don't have a camera in a 3D scene then how is godot supposed to know what to even render?

aXu_AP

I just noticed that there is a feature quite similiar to what I suggested. It's called project camera override and is found on toolbar in both 2D and 3D workspaces. I wonder if there is any way to automatically turn it on?

@Megalomaniak said: If you don't have a camera in a 3D scene then how is godot supposed to know what to even render?

This exactly is my reasoning. If there's no camera in 3D scene (for example, a scene of character controller or npc), there's nothing to render. It would be a safe bet to make something default in that case.

cybereality

Yes, it makes sense technically, how could you see anything without a camera? But it would help with rendering individual scenes if you wanted to test some isolated scene and didn't want to add a camera to everything.

aXu_AP

I came up with a workaround. I made a scene which loads in as a singleton, but deletes itself if another camera is present. If you launch world scene, everything works as usual. But if you open player scene and hit F6, the player controller ends up in test environment. You can test yourself with following code (attach this to a scene with camera and add the scene to autoload):

extends Node

func _ready():
	if search_for_camera(get_tree().root):
		queue_free()

func search_for_camera(node : Node) -> bool:
	if node == self:
		return false
	elif node is Camera:
		return true
	else:
		for child in node.get_children():
			if search_for_camera(child):
				return true
	return false

While this works well, I still would consider having this as an accessibility feature, easing new developers into 3D dev.

xyz

I wouldn't mind if there was a project-level option that'll inject wasd or editor-style camera when you run a standalone scene that doesn't have any. But then there's a question of adjusting properties of such default camera. Cramming it all into project prefs sounds like an overkill.

cybereality

Well that is one thing I like about Godot, it's a blank canvas. Unreal has all sort of stuff like this (default camera with all sorts of effects) which is nice when you are prototyping, but gets in the way of real development.

Calinou

The proper way to resolve this is to print a warning on startup if the scene has 3D nodes but no Camera3D (and do the same if a WorldEnvironment is missing in 4.0). It's doable, but it's not exactly trivial.

Relying on an implicit default camera or environment can cause issues down the line, so I'd prefer not to go back to that. (Godot 3.x has a default environment which often can cause more trouble than it resolves.)

cybereality

No, I definitely don't want default camera or environments, or really default anything. If I want something in my game, I will place it there purposefully. In any case, everyone gets confused 1 time for 1 minute the first time they open a 3D engine, and then it is not a problem afterwards.

aXu_AP

I guess I'm in the minority then. But it's not a big deal, as I found a workaround.