The three basic camera properties are its position, the direction in which it is pointing, and its orientation. The keywords for specifying these values are described below. The default values are designed to provide a reasonable view of a sphere of radius 2 located at origin. If these default values are used, the origin is projected onto the center of the image plane, with the world x axis running left-to-right, the z axis bottom-to-top, and the y axis going ``into'' the screen.
The default camera position is (0, -8, 0).
The default look point is the origin (0, 0, 0). The look point
and camera position must not be coincident.
This up vector need not be orthogonal to
the view vector, nor need it be normalized. The default up
direction is (0, 0, 1).
Another popular standard viewing geometry, with the x axis running left-to-right, the y axis bottom-to-top, and the z axis pointing out of the screen, may be obtained by setting the up vector to (0, 1, 0) and by placing the camera on the positive z axis.