Which rotation is shown in the Inspector? - unity3d

Question

The chest bone of my player can be rotated while aiming.
Now I wanted to evaluate how much (minimum and maximum rotation) I should let the chest be rotatable.
To do that, I allowed all degrees of rotation and took a look at the Inspector.
For example, the minimum value that the chest should be rotatable to the left should be Y=-15.
At Y=-15 (seen in the Inspector), it still looked natural.
Now I wanted to code this.
To my surprise, chest.localRotation.Y was a completely different value than what the Inspector is showing.
I have then taken a look at the chest variable and extended the view.
I just can't see the rotation value that the Inspector is showing.
How should I go on in this case, please?
I'm using this to rotate the bone:
Chest.LookAt(ChestLookTarget.position);
Chest.rotation = Chest.rotation * Quaternion.Euler(Offset);
Thank you!

Answer 1

The reason why it doesn't work:
Quaternion is not a human readable value.
One Quaternion is allways unique but can have multiple (infinite?) different representations in Euler space! The other way round one Euler represents allways exactly one Quaternion value.
If you look at the docs it explicitly says
Don't modify this directly unless you know quaternions inside out.
Than as said what you see in the inspector is the localRotation in relation to the parent Transform.
Better said it is one of the many possible Euler inputs that result in the Quaternion. What you see in the debug at localEulerAngles is another possible Euler representation. Unity usually in localEulerAngles also gives you only values > 0.
It seems that the chest anyway will only rotate around the Y axis, right?
If this is the case you can simply get the Angle between the chest's original forward vector and the target. It is way easier to handle Vector3 values than Quaternions ;)
It seems to be the same use case as in this post
// get the target direction
Vector3 targetDir = ChestLookTarget.position - Chest.position;
// Reset any difference in the Y axis
// since it would change the angle as well if there was a difference I the height
// between the two objects
targetDir.y = 0;
// however you currently rotate
// instead rotate only the Vector3 variable without applying it to the transform yet
Vector3 newDir = Vector3.RotateTowards(Chest.forward, targetDir, RotationSpeed * Time.deltaTime, 0.0f);
// Compare the target direction to the parents forward vector
float newAngle = Vector3.Angle(Chest.parent.transform.forward, newDir);
if (newAngle > MaxRotationAngle)
{
// What should happen if angle gets bigger?
return;
}
// If angle still okey set the new direction
Chest.rotation = Quaternion.LookRotation(newDir);