I found this in a very old thread: ---------- In other words picture yourself in an airplane: Yaw is turning right or left Pitch is turning up or down Roll is dipping one wing or the other ---------- Is there an easy way or formula to convert Yaw (in this example) to a 360 degree heading?

What units are your yaw calculations in?

What is the default facing vector of your models?

It was mostly a philosophical question really, I hadn't really done anything practical as yet with it. I just was doing research on 'yaw'/'pitch'/'roll' and was curious if/how the translation would be done.

So, I suppose in answering the question we could use whatever the most standard default vector and units would be.

The pitch/yaw/roll described in that excerpt is actually talking about relative motion in the airplane's local reference frame (i.e. what happens when you rotate the rudder or ailerons), not an absolute orientation. It doesn't make sense to "convert" between them. For instance, if you knew that turning the steering of your car to the right always turned your car right, that wouldn't actually be enough information to know what direction your car was heading. Ironically, that's something you'd already need to know for steering to be useful.

So if you already had an absolute orientation, then you would be able to determine how it changed depending on the airplane's relative motion. But this is something you need to know a priori.

You could project your local forward vector onto the ground plane and get the heading using a simple atan2-call. You should be able to get a local forward vector in global coordinates using your Yaw/pitch/roll-values, or a local-to-global-matrix constructed from those Yaw/pitch/roll-values.

Hope this helps :)