Virtual Solar System, new MVP matrix system

OpenGL OpenGL: Basic Coding
1

I’m trying to make a solar system where you can see Pluto from Earth. It seem that the OGL processing make it too small to be drawn. I think I need to control the rendering so that, if the radius is too small to be drawn, I can just set it to 1f.

I’ve written a whole engine so that I can control the drawing and now I’m at the hard part. I’m not sure how to do all the matrix manipulation. I even have the OpenGL Game Programming book. It skips over the critical part (showing inputs (and outputs) for the different matrices) because it’s relying on the old matrix stack system.
I just realized that I should have just rewritten the ogl renderer.

Some things I can’t figure out.

  1. How do you get the ‘lookAt’ for a ship that rotates all directions?
    Can I use the camera matrix?
    Vector3f lookDirection = cameraMatrix.toRotationMatrix().getColumn(Z);//Z = 2

  2. is there a tutorial with all the modelMatrix, viewMatrix, projectionMatrix inputs and the post vertex processing stuff (perspective divide and viewPort transform)?

2

Does the camera matrix transform from world space to eye space or from eye space to world space? If it’s the latter, then the forward direction is the third column. If it’s the former, then the forward direction is the third row (more precisely, it’s the third column of the matrix’ inverse; assuming that the camera transformation is just a rotation and translation, this is the third column of its transpose).