I just cannot figure out how to make an a point with a given velocity move around in cartesian space in my visualization while staying around a sphere (planet).
The input:
Many points with:
A Vector3 position in XYZ (lat/lon coordinates transformed with spherical function below).
A Vector3 velocity (eg. 1.0 m/s eastward, 0.0 m/s elevation change, 2.0 m/s northward).
Note these are not degrees, just meters/second which are similar to my world space units.
Just adding the velocities to the point location will make the points fly of the sphere, which makes sense. Therefore the velocities need to be transformed so stay around the sphere.
Goal: The goal is to create some flowlines around a sphere, for example like this:
Example image of vectors around a globe
So, I have been trying variations on the basic idea of: Taking the normal to center of my sphere, get a perpendicular vector and multiply that again to get a tangent:
// Sphere is always at (0,0,0); but just to indicate for completeness:
float3 normal = objectposition - float3(0,0,0);
// Get perpendicular vector of our velocity.
float3 tangent = cross(normal,velocity);
// Calculate final vector by multiplying this with our original normal
float3 newVector = cross(normal, tangent);
// And then multiplying this with length (magnitude) of the velocity such that the speed is part of the velocity again.
float final_velocity = normalize(newVector) * length(velocity);
However, this only works for an area of the data, it looks like it only works on the half of the western hemisphere (say, USA). To get it (partially) working at the east-southern area (say, South-Africa) I had to switch U and V components.
The XYZ coordinates of the sphere are created using spherical coordinates:
x = radius * Math.Cos(lat) * Math.Cos(lon);
y = radius * Math.Sin(lat);
z = radius * Math.Cos(lat) * Math.Sin(lon);
Of course I have also tried all kinds of variations with multiplying different "Up/Right" vectors like float3(0,1,0) or float3(0,0,1), switching around U/V/W components, etc. to transform the velocity in something that works well. But after about 30 hours of making no progress, I hope that someone can help me with this and point me in the right direction. The problem is basically that only a part of the sphere is correct.
Considering that a part of the data visualizes just fine, I think it should be possible by cross and dot products. As performance is really important here I am trying to stay away from 'expensive' trigonometry operations - if possible.
I have tried switching the velocity components, and in all cases one area/hemisphere works fine, and others don't. For example, switching U and V around (ignoring W for a while) makes both Africa and the US work well. But starting halfway the US, things go wrong again.
To illustrate the issue a bit better, a couple of images. The large purple image has been generated using QGIS3, and shows how it should be:
Unfortunately I have a new SO account and cannot post images yet. Therefore a link, sorry.
Correct: Good result
Incorrect: Bad result
Really hope that someone can shed some light on this issue. Do I need a rotation matrix to rotate the velocity vector? Or multiplying with (a correct) normal/tangent is enough? It looks like that to me, except for these strange oddities and somehow I have the feeling I am overlooking something trivial.
However, math is really not my thing and deciphering formula's are quite a challenge for me. So please bear with me and try to keep the language relative simple (Vector function names are much easier for me than scientific math notation). That I got this far is already quite an achievement for myself.
I tried to be as clear as possible, but if things are unclear, I am happy to elaborate them more.
After quite some frustration I managed to get it done, and just posting the key information that was needed to solve this, after weeks of reading and trying things.
The most important thing is to convert the velocity using rotation matrix no. 6 from ECEF to ENU coordinates. I tried to copy the matrix from the site; but it does not really paste well. So, some code instead:
Matrix3x3:
-sinLon, cosLon, 0,
-cosLon * sinLat, -sinLon * sinLat, cosLat,
cosLon * cosLat, sinLon * cosLat, sinLat
Lon/Lat has to be acquired through a Cartesian to polar coordinate conversion function for the given location where your velocity applies.
Would have preferred a method which required no sin/cos functions but I am not sure if that is possible after all.
Related
I'm not sure if something like this has been asked but I've spent days trying to figure this out to no avail.
I've been working on a project that has a straight tube and a sleeve placed some length down the tube, this part of the problem isn't causing any issues but the orientation of the placed sleeve is. When the sleeve is placed it is given a location that intersects another object giving it all the information it needs to be placed, but I need that sleeve to orient itself with the tube, pretty much just along the roll axis, but I would like to hammer out how yaw and pitch would be done similarly.
The tube has transform data connected to it. It has an origin for the center point of the tube, and 3 xyz points standing for each basis axis. in example for one of the tubes tested:
origin:{(119.814557964, -37.330669765, 8.400185257)},
BasisX: {(1.000000000, 0.000000000, 0.000000000)},
BasisY: {(0.000000000, 0.939692621, 0.342020143)},
BasisZ: {(0.000000000, -0.342020143, 0.939692621)}.
In some of the solution parts I've come across I found some ways this information is used. And I've had some success with this way of doing it:
(note: I realize this code has a lot of pointless variable use, I didn't want to adjust it and confuse myself more)
upDownAxis = givenSleeveObject.passedOnTransform.BasisZ;
leftRightAxis = givenSleeveObject.passedOnTransform.BasisX;
tempOfVector = givenSleeveObject.passedOnTransform.OfVector(upDownAxis);//this ofvector is applying the transform to the vector
rotationAngle = upDownAxis.AngleOnPlaneTo(tempOfVector, leftRightAxis);
This was able to give me the angle rotation of this particular tube which was 20 degrees.
The problem is that this doesn't really work along the y axis the same, and completely wrong along the z axis. Likely due to after rotating to z axis the axis for each direction changes to one of the others at that angle. Also if it is of any help, the direction of the tube basically follows the basisX. If z is the only one with a 1, it is heading upward.
So now my issue is, how can I find the roll of this tube no matter it's orientation? Also rotation direction might matter in the long run. Since this object's transforms are all connected to itself, there must be a way to know how much of a roll has been done to it even at an extreme of 45 in every axis, right?
I am quite new to this, and iv'e heard that i need to get my inversed projection matrix and so on to create a ray from a 2D point to a 3D world point, however since im using OpenglES and there are not as many methods as there would be regulary to help me with this. (And i simply don't know how to do it) im using a trigenomeric formula for this insted.
For each time i iterate one step down the negative Z-axis i multiply the Y-position on the screen (-1 to 1) with
(-z / (cot(myAngle / 2))
And the X position likewise but with a koefficent equally to the aspect ratio.
myAngle is the frustum perspective angle.
This works really good for me and i get very accurate values, so what i wonder is: Why should i use the inverse of the projection matrix and multiply it with some stuff instead of using this?
Most of the time you have a matrix lying around for your OpenGl camera. Using an inverse matrix is simple when you already have a camera matrix on hand. It is also (oh so very slightly at computer speeds) faster to do a matrix multiply. And in cases where you are doing a bajillion of these calculations per frame, it can matter.
Here is some good info on getting started on a camera class if you are interested:
Camera Class
And some matrix resources
Depending on what you are working on, I wouldn't worry too much about the 'best way to do it.' You just want to make sure you understand what your code is doing then keep improving it.
I use slerp to interpolate between two quaternions representing rotations. The resulting rotation is then extracted as Euler angles to be fed into a graphics lib. This kind of works, but I have the following problem; when rotating around two (one works just fine) axes in the direction of the green arrow as shown in the left frame
here
the rotation soon jumps around to rotate from the opposite site to the opposite visual direction, as indicated by the red arrow in the right frame.
This may be logical from a mathematical perspective (although not to me), but it is undesired. How could I achieve an interpolation with no visual flipping and changing of directions when rotating around more than one axis, following the green arrow at all times until the interpolation is complete?
Thanks in advance.
Your description of the problem is a little hard to follow, quite frankly. But it sounds like you need to negate one of your quaternions.
Remember, each rotation can actually be represented by two quaternions, q and -q. But the Slerp path from q to w will be different from the path from (-q) to w: one will go the long away around, the other the short away around. It sounds like you're getting the long way when you want the short way.
Try taking the dot product of your two quaternions (i.e., the 4-D dot product), and if the dot product is negative, replace your quaterions q1 and q2 with -q1 and q2 before performing Slerp.
How far is the total rotation? You may be asking for an interpolation for two orientation too far apart in angle. The math, quaternions or not, has trouble deciding which way to go, in a sense. Like not having enough keyframes in animation.
Determine a good intermediate orientation about halfway along, and make separate interpolations from the initial orientation to that intermediate one, and from the intermediate to the final.
I am using a 3D engine called Electro which is programmed using Lua. It's not a very good 3D engine, but I don't have any choice in the matter.
Anyway, I'm trying to take a flat quadrilateral and transform it to be in a specific location and orientation. I know exactly where it is supposed to go (i.e. I know the exact vertices where the corners should end up), but I'm hitting a snag in getting it rotated to the right place.
Electro does not allow you to apply transformation matrices. Instead, you must transform models by using built-in scale, position (that is, translate), and rotation functions. The rotation function takes an object and 3 angles (in degrees):
E.set_entity_rotation(entity, xangle, yangle, zangle)
The documentation does not speficy this, but after looking through Electro's source, I'm reasonably certain that the rotation is applied in order of X rotation -> Y rotation -> Z rotation.
My question is this: If my starting object is a flat quadrilateral lying on the X-Z plane centered at the origin, and the destination position is in a different location and orientation where the destination vertices are known, how could I use Electro's rotation function to rotate it into the correct orientation before I move it to the correct place?
I've been racking my brain for two days trying to figure this out, looking at math that I don't understand dealing with Euler angles and such, but I'm still lost. Can anyone help me out?
Can you tell us more about the problem? It sounds odd phrased in this way. What else do you know about the final orientation you have to hit? Is it completely arbitrary or user-specified or can you use more knowledge to help solve the problem? Is there any other Electro API you could use to help?
If you really must solve this general problem, then too bad, it's hard, and underspecified. Here's some guy's code that may work, from euclideanspace.com.
First do the translation to bring one corner of the quadrilateral to the point you'd like it to be, then apply the three rotational transformations in succession:
If you know where the quad is, and you know exactly where it needs to go, and you're certain that there are no distortions of the quad to fit it into the place where it needs to go, then you should be able to figure out the angles using the vector scalar product.
If you have two vectors, the angle between them can be calculated by taking the dot product.
I have a bunch of latitude/longitude pairs that map to known x/y coordinates on a (geographically distorted) map.
Then I have one more latitude/longitude pair. I want to plot it on the map as best is possible. How do I go about doing this?
At first I decided to create a system of linear equations for the three nearest lat/long points and compute a transformation from these, but this doesn't work well at all. Since that's a linear system, I can't use more nearby points either.
You can't assume North is up: all you have is the existing lat/long->x/y mappings.
EDIT: it's not a Mercator projection, or anything like that. It's arbitrarily distorted for readability (think subway map). I want to use only the nearest 5 to 10 mappings so that distortion on other parts of the map doesn't affect the mapping I'm trying to compute.
Further, the entire map is in a very small geographical area so there's no need to worry about the globe--flat-earth assumptions are good enough.
Are there any more specific details on the kind of distortion? If, for example, your latitudes and longitudes are "distorted" onto your 2D map using a Mercator projection, the conversion math is readily available.
If the map is distorted truly arbitrarily, there are lots of things you could try, but the simplest would probably be to compute a weighted average from your existing point mappings. Your weights could be the squared inverse of the x/y distance from your new point to each of your existing points.
Some pseudocode:
estimate-latitude-longitude (x, y)
numerator-latitude := 0
numerator-longitude := 0
denominator := 0
for each point,
deltaX := x - point.x
deltaY := y - point.y
distSq := deltaX * deltaX + deltaY * deltaY
weight := 1 / distSq
numerator-latitude += weight * point.latitude
numerator-longitude += weight * point.longitude
denominator += weight
return (numerator-latitude / denominator, numerator-longitude / denominator)
This code will give a relatively simple approximation. If you can be more precise about the way the projection distorts the geographical coordinates, you can probably do much better.
Alright. From a theoretical point of view, given that the distortion is "arbitrary", and any solution requires you to model this arbitrary distortion, you obviously can't get an "answer". However, any solution is going to involve imposing (usually implicitly) some model of the distortion that may or may not reflect the reality of the situation.
Since you seem to be most interested in models that presume some sort of local continuity of the distortion mapping, the most obvious choice is the one you've already tried: linear interpolaton between the nearest points. Going beyond that is going to require more sophisticated mathematical and numerical analysis knowledge.
You are incorrect, however, in presuming you cannot expand this to more points. You can by using a least-squared error approach. Find the linear answer that minimizes the error of the other points. This is probably the most straight-forward extension. In other words, take the 5 nearest points and try to come up with a linear approximation that minimizes the error of those points. And use that. I would try this next.
If that doesn't work, then the assumption of linearity over the area of N points is broken. At that point you'll need to upgrade to either a quadratic or cubic model. The math is going to get hectic at that point.
the problem is that the sphere can be distorted a number of ways, and having all those points known on the equator, lets say, wont help you map points further away.
You need better 'close' points, then you can assume these three points are on a plane with the fourth and do the interpolation --knowing that the distance of longitudes is a function, not a constant.
Ummm. Maybe I am missing something about the question here, but if you have long/lat info, you also have the direction of north?
It seems you need to map geodesic coordinates to a projected coordinates system. For example osgb to wgs84.
The maths involved is non-trivial, but the code comes out a only a few lines. If I had more time I'd post more but I need a shower so I will be boring and link to the wikipedia entry which is pretty good.
Note: Post shower edited.