Summary

In this chapter, we introduced the two mathematical elements quaternion and spline, and the counterparts in GLM, ready to use in our code. After a brief discussion about the shortfalls of the usual three-dimensional rotation and the advantages of quaternions in character animations, we checked out splines and their usage in code.

All the steps from the first rotation to the quaternion/spline interpolation are accompanied by interactive code examples, ready to be tried out and to see the results of changing input values. These examples should have helped you to get a good insight into the possibilities of the two new data types.

In the next chapter, we start with the animation part of the book. The first step will be the exploration of the file format, the components inside it, what we need from the data, and which parts can be left out.