Hi =)
I want to rotate my object only on the x axis looking at a target that rotates around the object’s x axis. Sounds easy at first. But the problem now is, after 90° of turning up or down, the object would be upside down, which results in a 180° turn around the y axis at those points. Imagine you are looking at a bee that’s flying though you legs. After it’s on the other side, you won’t having your head keep turning until it’s upside down while continue looking at the bee, but you turn 180° when it got behind you. Look at the attached image to see what I mean.
As I searched how to fix that problem peolple said things like
transform.LookAt(Vector3(0, target.y, target.z));
but then I just got a bit twitching…
The y rotation jumps from 90 to 270 because of that 180° turn, so I tried to make it stay always 90°, which just ended in some weird results…
Making the Objekt a child of another object, which is turned 90° so that it would rotate around the Y axis to look at the target. But the y axis just jumpf out of the parents rotation, having it’s y axis looking up in world space again …
I hope you understand what I mean and have a Idea how to fix that!
Presuming that in your drawing X is into the screen (weird, but it seems that’s what you are saying)
var targetPosition = target.position;
var currentPosition = transform.position;
targetPosition.x = 0;
currentPosition.x = 0;
transform.rotation = Quaternion.LookRotation(targetPosition - currentPosition, Vector3.up);
i had the same problem too with a charakter lookin at me, and rotated the model when i was at a higher level. what i used was you make the objects x rotation look at itself, its y rotation at the target, and the z rotation at itself.
in my script it looked like this, but in your case you need to tweak it a little.
Vector3 new_WayPointPos = new Vector3(nextWaypoint.position.x, transform.position.y, nextWaypoint.position.z);
Quaternion RotateTo = Quaternion.LookRotation(new_WayPointPos - transform.position);
transform.rotation = Quaternion.Slerp(transform.rotation, RotateTo, Time.deltaTime * 3);
i used a waypoint as a target.
I may have to update this when I get home, but i think this is exactly what I figured out last night. There is no transition to this code so it may be jerky. My case was I was making a turret on an object face a direction (x,z), but only wanted to rotate on local y even if the parent transform was rotated (eg tank on the side of a hill). Please note this is all from my memory and hasn’t been tested.
GameObject go;//Some GameObject that is always facing up World.up
...
var direction = camera.position - target.position;
var rel_direction = go.transform.InverseTransformDirection(direction);
//You may have to switch or invert the parameters to the Atan2 function, but this should lock your rotation around the x-axis
camera.rotation = Quaternion.Euler(Mathf.Atan2(rel_direction.y, rel_direction.z) * Mathf.Rad2Deg, 0, 0);
...
