Convert a heading/pitch (degrees) into a camera rotation

Questions
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1

I read some data and construct a scene using geometry. Then, I extract a heading and pitch in degrees and I want to orient the camera to match. My current approach is simply to convert heading and pitch into radians (roll_radians is always 0.0) and then call:

camera.rotation.order = 'YXZ';
camera.rotation.set( pitch_radians, yaw_radians, roll_radians );

For some instances this works. For some, it appears to be 180 degrees off and for others, some other seemingly random amount. I haven’t been able to spot a pattern - one with a heading of 186 degrees works and one with a heading of 235 needs 90 to be added to it before it’s correct.

I imagine I am either missing something important in my calculation or else, the heading/pitch data is not being decoded correctly.

Hopefully it’s the former (I have no additional insight into the data) - can anyone point me at the right way to do this?

2

Different order of rotations might result in different final orientation. Maybe try the default order, unless you have a specific reason to change it?

Also when you extract pitch_radians, yaw_radians, roll_radians they need to be extracted from the camera local coordinate system.

3

I think this is the gimbal lock problem. Try using quaternion to set the rotation.