topic Re: Reporting of Local Angles in 3ds Max Programming Forum

Reporting of Local Angles

Anonymous — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 15:21:13 GMT

Need: The Maxscript method for reporting an objects local orientation in space relative to the WCS.

Say I have an object starting off (and keyframed) orthoganal to the world, oh, a shoebox shaped box with the length of the box pointing in pure X, width in Y and top of the box straight up in Z. Then it is keyframed into other positions and orientations. I often use local X,Y,Z rotations to adjust it's orientation in space. The Max keyframe data shows only X,Y,Z values related to World Space. What I want to know is the X,Y & Z values of the object relative to it's local gizmo as offset from it's starting position.

I know why MAX works the way it does with angles (Quaternion, Euler controller, etc...), I don't need a history lesson there. I also know about XYZ ordering and how the order of the appied transforms give different results. Don't care about that. When the positioning is all said and done, I need to know its relative orientation in space.

I assume there is some math involved in a local to world coordinate system transformation, unless Maxscript has some query tools to shortcut the process. And not sure how you get a description of an objects Local axis reported. Every object in Max has a local gizmo. That info must be in the database.

Thank you in advance for any assistence.

Regards,

Buck Wyckoff

Buckward Digital

Re: Reporting of Local Angles

istan — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 21:56:35 GMT

I'm not really sure if I fully understood which TM you actually need. But you always can read any object's TM at any time and I usually use 'TM * Inverse(Parent_TM)' to get the local TM.

Re: Reporting of Local Angles

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 20:21:57 GMT

Thanks.

Maybe my wording was confusing. I know there is no local coordinate system stored in MAX or anything like that. There is only the world. My client wants to know the Yaw, Pitch & Roll of an object's orientation in space. To do that, I need to know the object's X,Y & Z angles with respect to the Local Coordinate System (the Local Gizmo).

I'm guessing this means you have to take the World rotation values and transform that data such that you get the same orientation in space but the rotations are reported relative to the objects local axis.

Re: Reporting of Local Angles

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 21:04:03 GMT

You are probably looking for

[ in ] coordsys <coordsys_spec>

Here's the link to the documentation: coordsys

Re: Reporting of Local Angles

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 21:53:19 GMT

Thanks.

I'll look into it.