I’m looking to figure out how to get a part to rotate around a moving position. I don’t mean rotating in place, I mean more like an orbit.
Something like this:
I used body movers to make it. Like this:
Any idea on how to do this? Maybe use some kind of CFrame operator?
I made a post similar to this awhile back (similar problem, I already had the orbiting part). I just needed to figure out how to alter the inclination angle.
Wow. The code is confusing to me; I’m not very good at math. What do math.sin and math.cos do/refer to? I haven’t learned trig yet, so I don’t really have a good understanding of the code.
Edit: some relevant background info on trig would’ve been helpful in understanding this lol. If you imagine walking around the Unit Circle, the distance to cover the entire circle is TAU (2*math.pi) or ~6.2832.
Just pi alone is half of a circle, pi/2 is a quarter of a circle, etc. This is why the loop is for i = 0, tau, increment do and the increment is divisible by TAU.
math.cos is used to get the X value and math.sin is used to get the Y value (both return a number between -1 and 1).
Edit: As for why cos and sin return a number between -1 and 1 is because of this:
If you look at the image above, the brown arrow points to where you start “walking” on the unit circle. Because math.cos is just giving you the X value, you’re at a distance of 1 unit away from the origin (the center). If you printed math.cos(0), you’d get 1. If you printed math.cos(math.pi) you’d get -1. Because math.pi is half the distance of a full circle, so it’s at (-1, 0) in the picture above. Cos is just reading that X value of -1.
You can imagine if you do this:
local tau = 2*math.pi -- mathematical constant
local increment = tau/60 -- for the loop
for i = 0, tau, increment do -- start at 0, go the full length of a circle, at an increment of a 60th of a circle each iteration
print(math.cos(i), math.sin(i))
task.wait()
end
math.cos(i) and math.sin(i) will give you the correct X and Y values to place the part to. To get a part to follow a circular path and point at the origin you could do:
local part = script.Parent
local tau = 2*math.pi -- mathematical constant
local increment = tau/360 -- for the loop
local origin = part.Position
local radius = 5 -- how far away the orbit is
while true do -- loop infinitely
for i = 0, tau, increment do -- main for loop like in the example
local pos = Vector3.new(math.cos(i), 0, math.sin(i)) * radius
part.CFrame = CFrame.new(origin + pos, origin)
task.wait()
end
end
And you’ll get this result:
https://gyazo.com/193cbac40005fef2c012e056b0dfff31
Edit: I’ll try and get a visualization of this working so you can sort of see what I mean by sin and cos going from -1 to 0 to 1 and vice versa.
If the part rotates at a constant offset to the center part you could simply maintain this offset in accordance to the position of the center part and rotate the part around the y-axis accordingly.
local centerPart = workspace.PartA
local rotatePart = workspace.PartB
task.spawn(function()
while task.wait() do
centerPart.Position += Vector3.new(1, 0, 0) --shift 1 stud along the x-axis every frame
rotatePart.Position = centerPart.Position + Vector3.new(0, 0, 0) --this vector3 should represent the constant offset the rotating part has to the center part
rotatePart.Orientation += Vector3.new(0, 1, 0) --rotate 1 stud around the y-axis every frame
end
end)
I’ve figured it out. I used some CFrame stuff, here it is!
Thanks for all the help and info!
Using your model as an example, is there a way to make it slower?
