DAE export and setting the default camera

[SimonBrown]

I'm working on an iBook project and this will involve 3D content derived from Photoscan Pro.

iBooks only supports .dae collada format, which is fine as Photoscan can export this.

However, the recommendation from iBooks is to set a default camera - the view that you wish the initial, starting image of the 3D model in iBooks to be.

There is an option in Export to "Include cameras" and this appears to set the first aligned camera to be the default view. It also appears that if you strip out 999 from (say) the 1000 aligned images then the single remaining camera is then selected as default in the dae file. By stripping out the unwanted cameras you can kind of set the default view, as long as one of the aligned images was taken with that in mind.

However, this is less than ideal. When working underwater it is very rare we can take a single image that encompasses the view we want - visibility often restricts our view and we cannot simply back off from the subject and shoot such an image - so the default view is zoomed into the 3D model. Underwater, we are always working very close to what are often massive subjects.

What I would like to do is orientate the model on screen to a suitable orientation and then say "this view is my default camera for dae export".

I have not found a way to do this - any advice from the forum would be most appreciated.