Angular Momentum

A couple of posts back, when dealing with rotation, I wondered how I could model the property of angular momentum. Inertial momentum is easy enough to represent with a speed vector which you add to the entity's position every frame. Velocity shares several characteristics with rotation, surprisingly. In physics angular velocity is also represented with a vector, with the direction determining the axis of rotation and the length the angular speed. I figured this was, after all, everything I needed. It would make sense then to try to use it.

The farther away from the axis of rotation, the greater the change in position.

It wasn't too much work to add a vector to the entity object, and modify the code so that pressing the rotation keys would add to this vector. The rather clever bit, I think, is that I store the vector in world coordinates. By keeping track of the frame of reference for my objects I can easily convert between local and world coordinates. This is important because I add rotation along the three local axis, but convert the addition to global coordinates before adding them to my rotation vector.


Then in the update logic I rotate along the vector's axis by an amount determined by its length. One thing to keep in mind though is that to make the rotation look realistic, I have to center models on their center of mass. Easy enough on regular geometric shapes, but I'll have to figure out something for complex models, or models with moving parts.

The demo for this is available for download: Framework-0.0.4r

It's fun to mess around with. There's a weird effect that happens when you spin up significantly, and the refresh rate starts to match up with the turning speed and the sphere appears to slow down or rotate backwards.

You can also hopelessly lose control of the thing if you mix too much spin in different directions. It should be possible to recover from the perspective of someone inside, since you can easily break down the spin one axis at a time. That's something for the next update, though.