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Getting the Forward Vector from a Camera's Current Rotation

Started by RunsWithScissors Apr 2, 2012 at 4:32 AM 3 replies 8.1k views

Original Post

Apr 2, 2012 at 4:32 AM

So I am working in C# using XNA and am trying to create a 6DOF camera for an airplane game using quaternions. I have a FPS quaternion camera made and working fine. The rotation of the aircraft camera is perfectly fine, but when I compute the forward vector of the aircraft to figure out the vector in which to apply forward movement, it doesn't always go in the correct direction. So in short, how can I find the current forward vector of a camera using the rotation quaternion in XNA?

I know there are tons of quaternion questions on here, but I haven't found any C# ones that have worked for me.

japro

Apr 2, 2012 at 6:52 AM

I guess the quaternion is used to rotate the "world" into the camera viewspace, so applying the inverse rotation to the view direction in camera space (0,0,1) should give you the desired direction.

turch

Apr 2, 2012 at 1:32 PM

Multiply the quaternion by whatever vector "forward" is in your coordinate system - most likely (0,0,1). You have to have a definition of forward - what direction do you want to get if the rotation is 0.

Edit: use this or this function

RunsWithScissors

Apr 2, 2012 at 11:42 PM

The problem with XNA is that there is no operator overload for multiplying a Vector3 and a quaternion. This is my current line of code to try to calculate the forward vector:

Vector3 forwardVector = Vector3.Transform(Vector3.Forward, camera.RotationQuaternion);

It only works in about half of the octants of the 3D space though.

RunsWithScissors

Apr 6, 2012 at 3:51 AM

So I appreciate the help, but I was able to figure it out on my own. So for anyone who encounters this problem with quaternions in XNA, the solution follows:

Quaternion temporaryQuaternion = camera.RotationQuaternion;
 temporaryQuaternion.Conjugate();
 Vector3 forwardVector = Vector3.Transform(Vector3.Forward, temporaryQuaternion);

If anyone can explain the math behind why you use the invese of the rotation quaternion to apply the transform to the world forward, I'd love to hear it.

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