Question

How can I find a position relative to a point that has been rotated? The idea is, that I’m rotating an entity at a certain position, and need to be able to find a position relative to that entity’s rotation, such that 10 units above the entity relative to its rotation is different from 10 units directly above the entity. Hopefully this diagram should give you an idea of what I mean:

Note: I’m doing this in the <canvas> tag with pure Javascript.

Also note: I’m only just finishing Algebra, and have done just a little trigonometry and some geometry, so please make your explanation relatively clear. Sin, cos, and tangent are only just beginning to make sense, and I had to look up the concept of radians myself the other day in order to work with <canvas>‘s rotation function (thanks, Wikipedia!).

Also also note: I have tried looking this up myself (Google, SO, elsewhere), but not knowing the proper terms, I wasn’t able to find anything. I’m sure this must be fairly simple, but it may as well be Greek to me.

Answer 1

If all you’re looking for is a point that is d units from a point (x,y) at an angle θ, where the angle is taken relative to the point as its origin, in the clockwise direction, from the positive y-axis, the point is given by (x + d*cos(π/2-θ), y + d*sin(π/2-θ))