What is the resulting rotation of the concatenation of two rotations ?
A rotation R is given by its rotation axis (x,y,z) and its rotation angle alpha.
Mathematically a rotation R can be realized by a rotation matrix M.
(x,y,z) and alpha are coded into this matrix.
Now: Given are two rotations
R0 with (x0,y0,z0) and alpha0 and
R1 with (x1,y1,z1) and alpha1.
The concatenation of two rotations R0 and R1 is represented
by the matrix product M of the corresponding rotation matrices M0 and M1,
ie. M = M1*M0 .
Question 1: Is the concatenation of two arbitrary rotations always a rotation ?
(I think so.)
Question 2: How can I compute exactly
the rotation axis (x,y,z) and the rotation angle of M ?
My solution: First step: Use OpenGL to compute M:
double M [16] ;
glMatrixMode ( GL_MODELVIEW) ;
glPushMatrix () ;
glLoadIdentity () ;
glRotated ( alpha1 , x1 , y1 , z1 ) ;
glRotated ( alpha0 , x0 , y0 , z0 ) ;
glGetDoublev ( GL_MODELVIEWMATRIX , M ) ;
glPopMatrix () ;
// second step: use M to compute (x,y,z) and alpha.
In the second step I analysed M several ways.
But numerical problems and special cases give unsatisfactory results.
Thank you in advance.