# Changing rotation_mode from YXZ to XYZ without changing orientation?

I am writing an importer in Blender that appends a object and then moves and rotates that object by some stored values I have created in Unity and saved to a Json file.

I found that in order to achieve the desired rotation I must first set my object to rotation_mode='YXZ' then I can create a new Vector with the order (X,Z,-Y) and my object will be rotated correctly:

degToRad = math.pi / 180

myobj.rotation_mode = 'YXZ'
jRot = json['rotation']

#Do something here to convert rotation back to XYZ...

myobj.rotation_mode = 'XYZ' #this causes the object to rotate unexpectedly


But when I attempt to revert the rotation_mode back to XYZ the object then rotates to some other orientation and I don't know how to prevent.

I am not sure if I am correctly changing handedness and up/forward with my above example but it seems to work ok.

I am curious if it is possible to change the rotation_mode from YXZ to XYZ without the orientation of my object changing?

Or is it possible to somehow apply a "converted" rotation so I can just keep the rotation_mode as XYZ?

Thanks for help!

You can use matrices, or quaternions. Unlike euler rotations, matrices or quaternions are comprised values which are order-independent.

There is no need to apply the "wrong" YXZ rotation to the object. You can store it in an mathutils.Euler object, the convert it to a mathutils.Matrix object and finally convert it back using a different rotation order.

import bpy
import mathutils

ob = bpy.context.active_object

x, y, z = 1, 2, 3

rot_YXZ = mathutils.Euler((x, y, z), 'YXZ')
rot_mat = rot_YXZ.to_matrix()
rot_XYZ = rot_mat.to_euler('XYZ')

ob.rotation_mode = 'XYZ'
ob.rotation_euler = rot_XYZ


The mathutils.Matrix.to_euler method takes the desired rotation order as the first argument.

• That was a wonderful explanation and a perfect solution. Thank you so much! – Logic1 Sep 16 '19 at 13:35
• Glad it helped, the mathutils module provides many useful conversion methods. For a deeper understanding I recommend this video as an introduction to the math of quaternion rotations, if you are interested in the logic behind these functions. – Leander Sep 16 '19 at 14:03