Game Engine Architecture

170 4. 3D Math for Games

by the sine of the half-angle of the rotation. The scalar part qS is the cosine of

the half-angle. So the unit quaternion q can be writt en as follows:

where a is a unit vector along the axis of rotation, and θ is the angle of rota-

tion. The direction of the rotation follows the right-hand rule , so if your thumb

points in the direction of a, positive rotations will be in the direction of your

curved fi ngers.

Of course, we can also write q as a simple four-element vector:

A unit quaternion is very much like an axis+angle representation of a ro-

tation (i.e., a four-element vector of the form [ a θ ]). However, quaternions

are more convenient mathematically than their axis+angle counterparts, as we

shall see below.

4.4.2. Quaternion Operations

Quaternions support some of the familiar operations from vector algebra,

such as magnitude and vector addition. However, we must remember that the

sum of two unit quaternions does not represent a 3D rotation, because such a

quaternion would not be of unit length. As a result, you won’t see any quater-

nion sums in a game engine, unless they are scaled in some way to preserve

the unit length requirement.

4.4.2.1. Quaternion Multiplication

One of the most important operations we will perform on quaternions is that

of multiplication. Given two quaternions p and q representing two rotations P

and Q, respectively, the product pq represents the composite rotation (i.e., ro-

tation Q followed by rotation P). There are actually quite a few diff erent kinds

of quaternion multiplication, but we’ll restrict this discussion to the variety

used in conjunction with 3D rotations, namely the Grassman product. Using

this defi nition, the product pq is defi ned as follows:

pq=⎡⎤⎣⎦(pqS Vq+ +×S Vp p qV V)(pqSS−⋅pqV V).

22

q[ ]

[ sin cos ] ,

VSq

θθ

=

=

q a 2 2 2 2

q[ ], where

sin ,

sin ,

sin ,

cos.

xyzw

x Vx x

y Vy y

z Vz z

wS

qqqq

qq a

qq a

qq a

qq

θ

θ

θ

θ

=

==

==

==

==