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Trig: was Re: did everone die from pesticides???

At 05:43 PM 7/13/98 -0500, you wrote:
>I am not a trig whiz, but a math major - what's up?
>
	I hope I can be forgiven the off topic post. Although it does have
-something- to do with SQFT Gardening.
	I have received many responses to my request for a Trig Whiz, it seems
like we have a lot of Math Majors of various flavors. I have also gotten a
few questions just out of curiosity. So for those folk, and in case someone
who hasn't responded, has the answer right off the top of their head, here
is what I am doing.
	I intend to make an animated scene description generator for POV-Ray, a
freeware 3D image rendering program. What this thing will do is allow
someone to describe an insect by answering some questions, then it will go
and make an animated model of that bug.
	I hope to be able to go further, makeing a true entomological tool out of
it, but for now, I just want to be able to send a link of a bug image to
the list gurus when I have an ID question.
	So anyway, what I need is a way to calculate the angles between a line
drawn across two points in 3D space as relative to the Z axis on the X-Y
plane. So that I can take an object that is created along the Z axis and
rotate it to span those points. This way I can generate any odd shape, then
just call it a leg and automatically place it in the "leg" space.
	What I am doing now is clumsy and inaccurate. I arbitrairily change all
values to positive non-Zero numbers, calculate the angles (using ANGLE =
arcsine(OPP / HYP) ), then using a bunch of nested if-then statements, I
re-rotate those values to the negative quadrants. It's messy, CPU
intensive, and I have to just add 0.001 to all zeros so as to make it work.
	Any help is appreciated, and thanks to those who are already working on
the problem, I will announce when I get a good answer so folk won't waste
skull sweat for nothing.
	That is, if I can continue to ask the indulgence of the list. All
responses to this posts should be sent privately, but I will post a
progress report to the list if I may.

----
Hey! I finally got my WEB Page back up!
      http://www.TheImageMill.com
        And parts of it actually work!
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