"arblick spule" <aspule> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm setting up a kind of "Character Studio" thing in POVRAY and have stumbled
> upon math problem that has had me headbutting my screen and slamming my
> calculator on my desk for two hours now.  The bruise is BIG!!
>
> Here we go :- Is there any way to convert a Matrix transform into absolute
> Translate&Rotate vectors?

You can do anything if you put your mind to it.  Sorry I don't have time for a
better answer at the moment, but if you think about rotating in one plane until
you're as close as you can get, then you rotate in the next plane to align the
axes, then you rotate around the axis to complete the alignment.  This all
assumes that it is only a rotation, not a skew-transformation.  (You could
always use the singular value decomposition to put a general transformation in
terms of two rotations and an scale...)  There might be a plug-and-chug method,
but I would recommend just breaking out dot products and arctan's.

 - Ricky

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