Mirroring with Matching or Different Axes

@zipit Hello, thank you again for your help!

You're right: the objects wouldn't be topologically aligned.

I will have a look into the math you provided here, but I don't understand what the other user choice options would be or what determines an object as being "x_source" or "y_target." I couldn't get it working.

In the meantime, I'm going to look into the solutions you proposed in your testing-the-script.c4d file again. Thank you

@zipit I am finally making progress, thanks to your help! I have implemented the inverted_result_axis,
target_adjustment_axis,target_adjustment_rotation and it's working. My concern now is that it's confusing to the user on how to get the desired output. I don't understand it all myself.

Could you please help me to understand what Inverted Result Axis means? In your code it says:

#inverted_result_axis (int): The axis to adjust in a reflected frame to make it conform with Cinema's left-handed matrices.

What would cause the need to change the Inverted Result Axis value? If there's a way to determine this value based on reflection axis, I'd rather not surface this as an option to the user. I noticed when the axes were the same, on opposite sides of the ZY plane, Inverted Result Axis was X, and in my examples where Target Adjustment Axis was Y, the Inverted Result Axis was Y.

Finally, if I'm able to reduce these options with the from-to-axis pair option, I'd be very interested if you would explain. As mentioned above, the pseudo code did not make sense to me enough to where I could build out the other user_choice options. Could you please explain the from-to-axis pair options and how this would work with your testing-the-script example?

ferdinand

Hi,

inverted_result_axis is similar to the xy, xz, and yz option in Cinema's tool and related to what we disused regarding left-handed and right-handed matrices. Reflecting a left-handed matrix (i.e. a Cinema matrix) will always give you a right-handed matrix. To make that result conform with Cinema's matrix orientation again, you will have to flip one axis of the result.

Actually you do not Because like I have shown in my first script and mentioned in the post before, you can feed a right-handed frame into a c4d.Matrix constructor (or modify an existing matrix in such way). Cinema will then just silently flip some random axis in your matrix to make it conformant again (which is both a terrible workflow and API design IMHO).

And I agree, the whole process is rather bloated regarding its options. You could technically remove the flipping option and either flip a fixed axis or leave the choice to Cinema, if you do not care about the orientation of the object. The from-to approach would not reduce the number of options, but replace the degree field by another drop-down selection menu. The idea behind this approach is to let the user select an axis in the source and then select an axis in the target, to which the axis in source should be rotated. This would imply the transform between both frames.

The only way to cut down on options is , like it is almost always the case, to make your code smarter, i.e. go the route of what I did refer to as the hard way. One way to do this could be to try to choose or compute a characteristic vector for your internal point data (i.e. the vertices attached to it) for both objects and then construct a quaternion for each object with these vectors and common arbitrary vector (does not really matter what vector). With that you could rotate the objects in and out an identical neutral orientation (for the lack of a better description). But that is only a rough outline, I would have actually try this myself and I am not even sure if this will work.

Cheers,
zipit

@zipit Thank you for all of the the replies and explanations!

I think I'm going to have to go the options way. The idea I had was the one I explained above: getting the axes' differences and applying them to the target_adjustment_rotation. I might be able to make it work...let's see.

The Quaternion method you described sounded promising but I wouldn't know how to do it based on your explanation.

Can I connect with you somehow off of the forum? I'd like to send you something as a token of my gratitude for your help.

ferdinand

Hi,

I am happy that I could help. It is very kind of you that you want to express your gratitude, but not necessary.

Happy coding and rendering,
zipit

kbar

@zipit I also want to say that the amount of time you contribute here to help out developers is very generous of you. You are doing an amazing job. I would hope that Maxon would actually pay you some retainer fee for your time or at least provide you with a free subscription for all the help you have given everyone here.