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You're reading from  Mathematics for Game Programming and Computer Graphics

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Published inNov 2022
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781801077330
Edition1st Edition
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Penny de Byl
Penny de Byl
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Penny de Byl

Penny de Byl is a full stack developer with an honors in graphics and Ph.D. in artificial intelligence for games. She has a passion for teaching, teaching games development and computer graphics for over 25 years in universities in Australia and Europe. Her best-selling textbooks, including Holistic Game Development with Unity, are used in over 100 institutions. She has won numerous awards for teaching, including an Australian Government Excellence in Teaching Award and the Unity Mobile Game Curriculum Competition. Her approach to teaching computer science and related fields is project-based giving you hands-on workshops you can immediately get your teeth into. The full range of her teaching interests can be found at H3D Learn.
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Working with unit quaternions

As discussed, quaternions remove the limitations involved in compounding Euler-angle rotations. In this section, we will concentrate on reprogramming the camera in our project to pitch and roll with quaternions.

Before quaternions are multiplied, we must ensure they are unit quaternions. That means they will have a length of 1. If we go back to thinking of quaternion spacing being a sphere encompassing Euclidean space, then a quaternion represents a vector from the origin of both spaces to the surface of the sphere. In Figure 16.9, the vectors q1 and q2 represent these. The vector representing a quaternion is four-dimensional, with the coordinates storing the angle and axis as .

Of course, you must remember we can’t see these four dimensions in our 2D/3D sphere diagram, but they are there. In Figure 16.8, q3 represents an invalid quaternion in that it extends beyond the surface of the sphere. However, the rotation that it is meant to represent...

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Mathematics for Game Programming and Computer Graphics
Published in: Nov 2022Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781801077330

Author (1)

author image
Penny de Byl

Penny de Byl is a full stack developer with an honors in graphics and Ph.D. in artificial intelligence for games. She has a passion for teaching, teaching games development and computer graphics for over 25 years in universities in Australia and Europe. Her best-selling textbooks, including Holistic Game Development with Unity, are used in over 100 institutions. She has won numerous awards for teaching, including an Australian Government Excellence in Teaching Award and the Unity Mobile Game Curriculum Competition. Her approach to teaching computer science and related fields is project-based giving you hands-on workshops you can immediately get your teeth into. The full range of her teaching interests can be found at H3D Learn.
Read more about Penny de Byl