Rotating around the Y axis

[lpress]

The roll/rotate slider of the rotate/zoom tool cannot go negative. Why is that and how can one rotate in both directions around the y axis?

[MJW]

That control can be confusing. To rotate in a negative direction around the Y axis, do one of two things:

 

1) Move the second slider to the right all the way to 180. The third slider will now rotate the plane in the negative direction; or,

2) Hold down the Shift key, and move center of the ball control leftward. (This will automatically move the second slider to 180.) Holding down the Shift key confines the direction of the tilt to horizontal or vertical.

 

Because the Rotate/Zoom control is confusing, I almost always first use the ball control to tilt the plane to the general desired position, then tweak it with the sliders. I think the Rotate/Zoom control follows the standard convention for pitch/yaw/roll, or something like that.

 

 

 

 

[Rick Brewster]

Yeah this is kind of weird -- the math for this was written a very long time ago. I'll make a note to look at it at some point. I did a quick prototype and the rendering does work for negative values, it's just a little weird because the Y value snaps back to the positive range once you modify another property (it still look and behaves correctly, the property values are just kind of weird).

[lpress]

On 12/24/2022 at 3:55 PM, Rick Brewster said:

Yeah this is kind of weird -- the math for this was written a very long time ago. I'll make a note to look at it at some point. I did a quick prototype and the rendering does work for negative values, it's just a little weird because the Y value snaps back to the positive range once you modify another property (it still look and behaves correctly, the property values are just kind of weird).

Thanks for Paint.Net -- I've used it for years and have probably had a thousand students use it as well.