Ok, I''ve heard all about Gimbal lock and its evilness inherent with Euler angles, and I''m ready to dive into quaternions... Anyone know a site/good book/tutorial/info/anything regard this?? I can''t seem to find any info of this anywhere... Thanks!!

Really good text on quaternions can be hard to find on the net. Many presentations and much talk about gimbal lock but nothing too deep. Two book choices depending on what you want:-

Real-Time Rendering by Thomas Moller, Eric Haines ISBN 1568811012 is a popular graphics programming book amongst game developers. They cover quaternions as far as there is pseudocode and algorithms presented, enough for you to write the code for your game and get on with it. It doesn''t go into much mathematical detail though.

If you really want to learn about quarternions rather than just use them (its surprising how many ''users'' there are) then Quaternions and Rotation Sequences by J.B. Kuipers ISBN 0691058725 is the book you need. This will teach you everything about Quats and even those who are learning about matrices will find that everything is covered here.

I just want to use them I've'd an overdose of ring theory already

You'd think there'd be a game dev article on them
If I ever figure them out enought to use the effectively I may write one, but I imagine that someone who had a little more experience with them could do a better job.

I did find some email archives, but they were theory heavy and application poor. I posted a similar thread a few days ago, and succint gave me useful info, go look for it

Magmai Kai Holmlor
- The disgruntled & disillusioned

...
sry succint, I meant useful not useless!

Edited by - Magmai Kai Holmlor on January 12, 2001 8:14:11 PM

Thanks guys!! That "Quaternions and Rotation Sequences" book looks good, from all the reviews on Amazon.com, it seems that it''s worth the $50...

$50 for that one topic seems like alot to me.

Hi, maybe I''m a moron (it''s quite possible) but I have that book and I think it is EXTREME overkill for game development purposes. What helped me the most was the article on Gamasutra, just search for quaternion. I''ve used them for a while, and if you have a library (or use D3DX), I see no reason to learn the "meaning" of the four numbers that represent a quaternion. Just offering some advice from someone who spent a lot of time learning stuff I later found I would have no use for. :-)


Zeus Interactive

There is a nice report from The danish university of computer science about the subject.

and the good part about it, is that it is free

ftp://ftp.diku.dk/pub/diku/image/quat.98-5.zip