A Crash Course in Understanding Quaternions

Learn how you can understand and implement quaternion rotations in your game projects

What you’ll learn

A Crash Course in Understanding Quaternions

A background overview of the mathematics that underpins quaternion rotations.
How gimbal lock occurs and why it is an issue with Euler angle rotation calculations.
Why do quaternions provide a superior way of calculating rotations over Euler’s formula?
How to use quaternions to rotate 3d objects in the Unity Game Engine with C#.

Requirements

Be able to explain why quaternions are better than Euler angles for calculating rotations.
Be able to apply quaternion operations in Unity to orientate 3d objects.

Description

Quaternions

are like vegetables. You know they are good for you but you aren’t sure why and if only you knew how to make them taste good. Okay so you aren’t going to be eating quaternions, but you get the idea. They are this really advanced topic in geometry and mathematics that anyone who designs or programs games has heard about, might have even used, but have no real understanding about what they are achieving and why they are better than other methods.

This short course will demystify the concept for you. No, it won’t give you the level of understanding of a postgraduate university mathematics major but it will provide you with the theory that will help you put quaternions and rotations in 3D space in context and give you the skills to use them with confidence in your game projects to overcome the limitations of other rotational methods.

Learn how to program and work with:

4×4 Matrices to represent Euler angles.
Quaternion operations are included in the Unity API.
Rotational controls for Sleep, RotateTowards, and LookAt.

Contents and Overview

In this short course, you will gain an understanding of the history of rotational mathematics and how quaternions came into existence.

The second half of the course provides some hands-on tutorials for applying quaternions to move and rotate 3D objects in the Unity Game Engine using C#.

What students are saying about Penny’s courses:

Turns out, the hardest part of this course for me is finding the words to describe how glad I am to have enrolled in it.
I honestly love Hollistic’s teaching approach and I’ve never learned so much within a few hours about coding effectively with such detailed explanations!
Penny is an excellent instructor and she does a great job of breaking down complex concepts into smaller, easy-to-understand topics.