Quaternions

If you've ever asked for help on the GMC for 3d rotations, you've probably heard that word. But in my experience, noone has ever really explained them to me, so I never took what they have said at face value. Which is too bad for me, because after doing a little research on my own time, I've found that they are Awesome. I'm not going to write a tutorial in my dev blog, but I'll gladly explain elsewhere (comments section, maybe?) if needed.

I will however provide these three awesome links that helped me out a lot.
http://www.flipcode.com/documents/matrfaq.html
http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial/3d/quaternions.html
http://www.gpwiki.org/index.php/OpenGL:Tutorials:Using_Quaternions_to_represent_rotation

Anyway, what have I done with quaternions? I have used them to create rotations that can manipulated on the screen with your mouse. The functions are almost completed, but sometimes the original mouse position is forgotten and returning the mouse to it doesn't result with the starting rotation.

With Quaternions I should also be able to merge the turn rotation into the main rotation at compile time, so that's another optimization I should note.

After this, I'll try to incorporate clicking separate parts on the screen to select them, and maybe then I'll be able to redo the GUI (I'm looking forward to it).

I'm Back

Wow. I can't believe it's been 3 paychecks since my last post. I'm sorry for the inactivity, but I'm back from Robotics Camp. I had fun, but this isn't what this blog is for. This for SERIOUS BUSINESS.

And I'm all for serious business right now.

So my plans right now are to implement the ideas and fixes I thought about before my leave, but also... To completely overhaul the GUI for the animator and skeleton creator. I'm hoping to have menu bars, scrollwheel support, and more interactivity with the field. As in: I'm hoping that I can implement clicking on the parts to choose them or rotating/moving them by dragging the mouse on the screen.

Once again, sorry for the long wait.

In other news, whoever marked all of the posts as "That's Dumb": I'll have you know that I take that very seriously* and to tell you the truth, it really ruined my day**.

*I don't.
**It didn't.

Progress is Slow. Period.

I'm probably not going to have much time to work on this project over the next week or so, I have a summer camp to go to and then there's work.

Hmmm...

Not good at all.