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Special effect orientation with offset

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How to make an effect face an angle with offset to its roll and pitch?

For example, an effect's 3D orientation is facing a unit's head, but I want to make it face a little up and a little left of it's current orientation (pitch and roll).

And what is the formula to set an effect facing (the pitch is straight) angle towards a unit? I know I can use roll angle only, but I think I can't make offset facing later.

facing.png


pitch.png
 
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Jesus, this is complicated. These Yaw, Pitch, Roll angles are defined so awkwardly and have nothing to do with how they're normally defined.

I made a test here and tried to align this Starfall effect to the unit in the way you described. Hope I interpreted it correctly.

It doesn't work 100% yet. The prefactors "Cos(Phi)" and "Sin(Phi)" in the Set Yaw/Pitch functions are wrong. They were just guesses. I'd have to look into the trigonometry formulas for that situation to get the correct ones. I tried rotating the effect to horizontal orientation, then rotating it around the Z-axis so it faces the Paladin + offset, then rotating it back towards the Z-axis to account for the vertical offset, but that didn't work.

Maybe this is still a good starting point or maybe someone smarter can pick it up from here. Also, maybe there is a function someone wrote that converts to these yaw, pitch, roll angles from something more intuitive.
 

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Level 13
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Mar 29, 2012
Messages
530
Sorry I might not being too straightforward.
I used this to find the pitch angle of an effect towards a target unit:
JASS:
function GetDistance2D takes real x, real y returns real
    return SquareRoot(x * x + y * y)
endfunction

function AnglePointsZ takes real distance2D, real z returns real
    return Atan2(z, distance2D)
endfunction

// find pitch angle towards target.
// [posX, posY, posZ] is the effect's position.
// [targetX, targetY, targetZ] is the target unit's position.
set anglePointsZ = AnglePointsZ(GetDistance2D(.targetX - .posX, .targetY - .posY), .targetZ - .posZ)
Then I use a unit (caster)'s facing angle to be used as the facing angle of the effect (because the caster should always be facing the target unit):
set cFacing = GetUnitFacing(.node.caster) * bj_DEGTORAD

At this point, I'm not sure if this is the right way to make the effect face the direction I mentioned above (still the same concept).
JASS:
set .pitch = GetRandomReal(anglePointsZ + rPitchLimit[2], anglePointsZ + rPitchLimit[1])
set .roll = GetRandomReal(cFacing - rFacingWidth, cFacing + rFacingWidth)
call BlzSetSpecialEffectOrientation(.rocket, 0, .pitch, .roll)
// I don't use the 'yaw' (0), cuz I don't fully understand how these 3 values work.

// these variables below are initialized earlier.
set rFacingWidth = ROCKETS_FACING_WIDTH / 2. * bj_DEGTORAD
set rPitchLimit[1] = ROCKETS_PITCH_LIMIT_UP * bj_DEGTORAD
set rPitchLimit[2] = ROCKETS_PITCH_LIMIT_DOWN * bj_DEGTORAD
 
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Level 13
Joined
Mar 29, 2012
Messages
530
Blizz messes yaw and pitch afair.
Yup, this math stuff is blowing my mind.
You've done a lot of work on this already. Might have been good to include that in the OP :(.
Basically, I only try to understand what some of those lines of formula does from various resources. Then I try to solve them to be the formula I wanted. I never fully understand those trigonometry functions. :)

What's OP?
 
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