Off-diagonal inertia tensor elements

Buzzer
Posts: 7
Joined: Mon Feb 05, 2007 6:08 pm

Off-diagonal inertia tensor elements

Post by Buzzer »

I am moving a box around in a custom physics engine. I'm using an inertia tensor copied from wikipedia. It works fine, however, only the diagonal of the inertia tensor is used.

Ideally, I want one side of the box (the positive z axis in local space) to be up far more often than its opposite. Can I play with the off diagonal components in the tensor so it rotates more quickly or slowly (with the same momentum) depending on how much the local positive z axis aligns with the world z axis?