What is the Z reading on Scene Space Direction (from Look-At Rotator) a measurement of?
While playing with the Scene Space Direction output from a Look-At Rotator, it seems fairly straight forward to see what the X and Y wires are measuring, with each 90 degree angle from the world axis being represented as a percentage, either positive or negative.
I can't for the life of me figure out what the Z reading is telling me though. Sometimes it seems to match up perfectly with the X reading but not at others.
I'm trying to figure this out to get a gun turret I'm working on to point exactly at my target and am currently using keyframe animation to turn the turret left, right, up and down, so the outputs from Look-At Rotator are useful to give me info but can't actually use the device to physically move my turret.
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X will be left/right for the grid. Y will be up/down for the grid. Z will be forwards/backwards for the grid.
The look-at rotator should move objects for you, and you can tell it the name of a tag to try to face--meaning you won't have to figure out the values manually. Maybe that would help?
If it's not moving the object, it's probably not attached properly. Move the look-at rotator and hold L1 to surface-snap it to the object you want to move. This will automatically "attach" that object to the rotator. Alternatively, tweak the rotator and look in the last "inputs & outputs" tab. There will be a circular button, called "affected object" (or similar). Click it, then click on the object you want to be affected by the look-at rotator.
Check out this video to find out how to use the look-at rotator in general: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgQ_GAU2LiA -
Thanks for the post but I'm ok with using the rotators.
I'm currently working on an object that is keyframe animated because what I want to achieve does not work well using rotators due to the loose physics involved. Therefore I'm trying to use the position and direction data manually to tell my turret how far along it's timeline it needs to go in order to rotate the correct number of degrees.
I know I could do this by giving it trigger zones but that feels clumsy and a lot of work so I've been trying to figure out how to use the outputs from rotators (set to zero strength) to get the numbers I need. Without access to trig functions, it's a major pain and I guess the easy solution may well be to just create my own trig functions but I'm guessing that's going to be quite thirsty on the thermo. -
Trig functions are in the dreamiverse! Pretty light on thermo if I recall. Tip if you want to find things like this is to select the Contraption > Logic tag and then enter your search term. I had no idea there were subtags so this was really useful.
Also, I might be not understanding correctly but if you want to know how far something has rotated along each axis can you not use an angle sensor? The orientation output fat wire can be split into X,Y,Z rotations in scene space. -
Yeah I have found a couple of arctan chips but unfortunately they're not using very accurate algorithms yet. And for the moment at least, I want to build my own stuff as much as possible so that I learn how to do things better along the way.
Anyway, I have actually discovered a solution to my query now after figuring out the 'Scene Space Direction' data and my gatling gun now locks on with deadly accuracy down to the pixel! (Embarrassingly I was experiencing difficultly because of a schoolboy error while splitting and re-combining a load of data for wireless transmission ><).
I did try the angle sensor along the road to finding my solution but I couldn't quite fathom the readings it was giving me when I tried to equate them to the problem I was trying to solve. It seemed odd that there is actually an option to make the angle sensor 'relative' to another object, but doing so didn't seem to affect any of the outputs at all as they were still reporting standard 'world space' rotations. So couldn't get what I needed from it. At least not without setting up a couple of them a subtracting one set of readings from the other I guess, to get something local to my chopper's orientation.
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