ICE Trigonometry nodes: degrees or radians?


The docs don’t say whether the Trigonometry nodes like Cos and Sin work with degrees or radians, so you have to figure it out yourself. Fortunately, that’s pretty easy to do. You just check which of these returns -1: cos( 180 ) or cos( π) ?

I went a little overboard, but this shows that Cos and Sin expect angular measurements expressed in degrees.

This is based on some basic trigonometry, which can be pretty handy when working with ICE:

  • 2*π radians is equivalent to 360 degrees, so π is 180 degrees.
  • cos( θ ) is the X coordinate of a point on the unit circle, so we know that at 180 degrees (or π if using radians), Cos will return -1.