JavaScript 3D space ship rotation
- by user36202
I am working with a fairly low-level JavaScript 3D API (not Three.js) which uses euler angles for rotation. In most cases, euler angles work quite well for doing things like aligning buildings, operating a hovercraft, or looking around in the first-person. However, in space there is no up or down. I want to control the ship's roll, pitch, and yaw. To do that, some people would use a local coordinate system or a permenant matrix or quaternion or whatever to represent the ship's angle. However, since I am not most people and am using a library that deals exclusively in euler angles, I will be using relative angles to represent how to rotate the ship in space and getting the resulting non-relative euler angles.
For you math nerds, that means I need to convert 3 euler angles (with Y being the vertical axis, X representing the pitch, and Z representing a roll which is unaffected by the other angles, left-handed system) into a 3x3 orientation matrix, do something fancy with the matrix, and convert it back into the 3 euler angles. Euler to matrix to euler.
Somebody has posted something similar to this on SO (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1217775/rotating-a-spaceship-model-for-a-space-simulator-game) but he ended up just working with a matrix. This will not do for me. Also, I am using JavaScript, not C++. What I want essentially are the functions do_roll, do_pitch, and do_yaw which only take in and put out euler angles.
Many thanks.
