Concatenate Quaternions and apply on 3D entities

Concatenate Quaternions

Quaternions are used to represent an orientation in 3D space. The concat method exposed by the Quaternion class can be used to combine two quaternions. In this code example, we combine two quaternions and get a third resulting quaternion, and then apply these three quaternions to three cylinders.

Programming Sample

This code example combine two quaternions and apply them to different cylinders.

// The path to the documents directory.
String MyDir = RunExamples.getDataDir();
Scene scene = new Scene();
Quaternion q1 = Quaternion.fromEulerAngle(Math.PI * 0.5, 0, 0);
Vector3.X_AXIS.x = 3;
Quaternion q2 = Quaternion.fromAngleAxis(-Math.PI * 0.5, Vector3.X_AXIS);
// Concatenate q1 and q2. q1 and q2 rotate alone x-axis with same angle but different direction,
// So the concatenated result will be identity quaternion.
Quaternion q3 = q1.concat(q2);
// Create 3 cylinders to represent each quaternion
Node cylinder = scene.getRootNode().createChildNode("cylinder-q1", new Cylinder(0.1, 1, 2));
cylinder.getTransform().setRotation(q1);
cylinder.getTransform().setTranslation(new Vector3(-5, 2, 0));
cylinder = scene.getRootNode().createChildNode("cylinder-q2", new Cylinder(0.1, 1, 2));
cylinder.getTransform().setRotation(q2);
cylinder.getTransform().setTranslation(new Vector3(0, 2, 0));
cylinder = scene.getRootNode().createChildNode("cylinder-q3", new Cylinder(0.1, 1, 2));
cylinder.getTransform().setRotation(q3);
cylinder.getTransform().setTranslation(new Vector3(5, 2, 0));
MyDir = MyDir + "test_out.fbx";
// Save to file
scene.save(MyDir, FileFormat.FBX7400ASCII);

Result in 3ds MAX

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