Getting Euler angles exactly as shown in inspector?

I am trying to use the rotation values from a Unity gameobject in another program. But I can’t get the two to agree on rotations of all axes and at certain angles, the object in the other program flips over or backwards.

Here’s the inconsistency I am seeing:

INSPECTOR: x: -89 y: 0 z: -90 <|> PRINTS: x: 271 y: 0 z: 270
INSPECTOR: x: -90 y: 0 z: -90 <|> PRINTS: x: 270 y: 270 z: 0
INSPECTOR: x: -91 y: 0 z: -90 <|> PRINTS: x: 271 y: 180 z: 90

When I sweep the object from 0 to 180 and check in the external program, I see that at 90 degrees the object does some random flips. However if I enter the rotations manually exactly as displayed in the inspector, the external program works perfectly fine.

All I am doing is printing (and saving these values to a text file for the external program to use):

Vector3 eulerAngles = object.rotation.eulerAngles;
Debug.Log("transform.rotation angles x: " + eulerAngles.x + " y: " + eulerAngles.y + " z: " + eulerAngles.z);

I have even tried object.localEulerAngles and object.localRotation.eulerAngles but get the exact same inconsistency.

Why is there no way to get these values? I have been on Google for a very long time and nothing is explained. I need the inspector values or a way to trick Unity into producing the same numbers via other means.

Please help, my script is so close, I just can’t believe the inspector and the printed values differ by so much and there’s no way to get the values shown, that’s insane!!

Unity doesn’t actually use the inspector values for rotation directly. Instead it stores them as a Quaternion. When you use eulerAngles it converts the Quaternion back to angles similar to the inspector, but I don’t believe you will get any negative values back like you can enter into the inspector.

-90 and +270 are the same exact angle as far as Unity is concerned, so when you enter -90 and get back +270 there actually is no inconsistency, even if it isn’t playing well with your external program. .

You can find more details in this forum post

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