Component of a quaternion rotation around an axis

Question

I'm having trouble finding any good information on this topic. Basically I want to find the component of a quaternion rotation, that is around a given axis (not necessarily X, Y or Z - any arbitrary unit vector). Sort of like projecting a quaternion onto a vector. So if I was to ask for the rotation around some axis parallel to the quaternion's axis, I'd get the same quaternion back out. If I was to ask for the rotation around an axis orthogonal to the quaternion's axis, I'd get out an identity quaternion. And in-between... well, that's what I'd like to know how to work out :)

Answer 1

There is an elegant solution for this problem, specially suited for quaternions. It is known as the "swing twist decomposition":

in pseudocode

/**
   Decompose the rotation on to 2 parts.
   1. Twist - rotation around the "direction" vector
   2. Swing - rotation around axis that is perpendicular to "direction" vector
   The rotation can be composed back by 
   rotation = swing * twist

   has singularity in case of swing_rotation close to 180 degrees rotation.
   if the input quaternion is of non-unit length, the outputs are non-unit as well
   otherwise, outputs are both unit
*/
inline void swing_twist_decomposition( const xxquaternion& rotation,
                                       const vector3&      direction,
                                       xxquaternion&       swing,
                                       xxquaternion&       twist)
{
    vector3 ra( rotation.x, rotation.y, rotation.z ); // rotation axis
    vector3 p = projection( ra, direction ); // return projection v1 on to v2  (parallel component)
    twist.set( p.x, p.y, p.z, rotation.w );
    twist.normalize();
    swing = rotation * twist.conjugated();
}

And the long answer and derivation of this code can be found here http://www.euclideanspace.com/maths/geometry/rotations/for/decomposition/