How to smoothly rotate to certain directions using input axis

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1

Kind of a big question here.

I have a space ship. I want it to face different directions based on the arrow keys/wasd. I don’t mean look straight to the left or straight up, but on an angle. So if my ship is facing forward and I press up, the ship would loop up at a 45 degree angle and straight when I let go.

That would seem kinda simple, but I need it to work for up down left right as well as when you hold down left and up and so on so forth. I tried creating 8 empty objects around the ship and using look at to determine where the ship is facing, but it just flips out and goes crazy.

There has to be a better way. I have a hard time grasping unity rotation, but what I basically need is to store 8 different rotations for an object and smoothly switch between them depending on what buttons I’m pressing.

Any help would be awesome.

Edit: I’m using C#

2

If you have the the “Horizontal” and “Vertical” axes setup in their default configuration, you can get the rotation you are looking for with just a few lines of code:

#pragma strict

var speed = 5.0;

function Update () {

	var v3 = Vector3(Input.GetAxis("Horizontal"), Input.GetAxis("Vertical"), 1.0);
	var qTo = Quaternion.LookRotation(v3);

	transform.rotation = Quaternion.Slerp(transform.rotation, qTo, speed * Time.deltaTime);
}