Why are some rotation values negative and others not?

[anonymous_user_e5537d5e]

@;247864

Oh I already did what I wanted. My question was about the thinking of having different rotation representations under different circumstances. Specifically values that logically sound like they should give the same result (rotation of an actor) giving different results depending on which node you use in a blueprint.

I’m trying to wrap my head around that way of thinking. With the hope I can at least start to discern a pattern to it. I guess I’m trying to understand the Unreal programmer mentality, because it feels a bit alien to me still (for instance I’d never return different values without an explicit change in purpose).

As you get the Yaw value as a Float, then as far as a computer is concerned then both positive and negative numbers are equally valid, and it is not uncommon in programming that things representing the same thing can be stored in different ways, and you are free to store it and compute it in the most efficient way you can.

Sometimes Yaw and Pitch are enough, and can keep things simple,
Sometimes Quaternions are more flexible allowing interpolation,
Sometimes Matrices are efficient at transforming large numbers of vectors,
Sometimes you need to go from one representation to an other for those reasons, as certain computations are easier/faster for some specific representation.