The Only Way is Up?

Monday, March 24th, 2008

Just which up would that be?

Hopefully you wern’t looking for the lyrics to a 1988 hit by Yazz and the Plastic Population and thought the title included punctuation. If you were I hope you’ll accept my appologies and leave quiety back to google or whatever search engine sent you here…

I’ve spent part of the long Easter weekend trying to get pyODE to play nicely in Vue. If I don’t bring rotations into the set up everything plays nicely and a simple simulation of bouncy sphere works fine. If I foolishly try to use cubes and apply a little rotation to them: BAM! rotations get skewed, objects vanish mysteriously as rotations take on impossible values.

I was going to do some writing or editing this week end or maybe a render or two. Its not like there was anything worth watching on TV, my regular viewing all got cancelled for Easter. I could even have wasted it on the latest meem to catch DarkDwarf in its insidious tentacles. Instead I’ve been reading up on vector, coordinate systems and other stuff I thought I’d not need to worry about again since I was in my early 20s. The problem, I suspect, lies in up not being right. Vue uses Z for depth and Y for height. pyODE uses Z for height and Y for depth. Somewhere in the conversion errors are creaping in and hence good data in gives garbage out.

Now if I can just figure out which way is up I’ll be fine.

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