Matrix Issues

[Lontahv]

Didn't know where else to put this (scripting journal looks a little locked up ).

I've gotten some simple cluster-group mesh exporting correctly, now I have to deal with the Blender->plSpanInstance part.

Now, this wouldn't be such a problem if Cyan hadn't made L2W the only 4x3 in Plasma. And it doesn't help that Blender only outputs 4x4's.
I was reading about 3d matrices online and it seems like 3x3's can hold rotation info, 4x4's hold rotation and translation info... UH why is Cyan using a odd in-between for Local2World? Why not just do what they did for spans and use 4x4's.

/me is starting to realize why Drizzle has no Cluster-Group support (and Drizzle doesn't even have to make anything new *HRMPH*).

Well, hopefully someone with more matrix-math knowledge will arrive on the scene and save me from this.

[Christian Walther]

Not sure if this helps, since most of what you're saying is Greek to me:

When you have only rotation and translation (or a general affine transform) in a 4x4 matrix, its last row is always [0 0 0 1]. So a 4x3 (or is that 3x4?) matrix is actually sufficient to store an affine transform. Putting anything different into the fourth row gets you a projective transform.

[Aloys]

OMG call neo!
(what? someone had to do it, right?.. okay; thinking of it, maybe not. )

[Lontahv]

Well, just to make sure you people have the idea (and I'm not just confusing you if I'm in the wrong with the matrix's name):

Here's the layout (even if it's not the matrix-Null):
[[0,0,0,0], [0,0,0,0], [0,0,0,0]]

or in usual matrix style:

[[0,0,0,0],
[0,0,0,0],
[0,0,0,0]]

Maybe this is just a lobbed-off 4x4.
I guess I can try to figure out from the Cyan ones... but that'd be the last resort. I'd like to figure this out fully rather than probing around (if I can).

[Grogyan]

Like you i'm going to have to study this script hard
http://blenderfrance.free.fr/python/Trajectory_en.htm

The guy that did it uses matrices.

Its almost what i'm trying to achieve, but right now it'll probably help you more

[PhilippH]

I haven't done much in 3D manipulation myself. So this is just a guess.

Perhaps the 3x3 part of the matrix is the normal rotation and in the remaining 3x1 part is the translation? Like [x, y, z] means move x in x direction, y, z accordingly.

[Nadnerb]

I'm not sure what your problem is. You just need to drop the last row, since it's not useful anyway, as somone pointed out already. Make a new 4x3 and assign the first 3 rows of your 4x4 to it. Just remember you need to transpose your blender matrices before using them in plasma.

[Lontahv]

Thanks Nad, I think that helped. I forgot to transpose it and so, it cut off the transform values when I cropped the end off. Problem seems to be solved.