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The Use of Quaternions for Animation, Modelling and Rendering

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New Trends in Computer Graphics

Abstract

Quaternions, although not well known, provide a solid base to describe orientation of an object or a vector. They are efficient and well suited to solve rotation and orientation problems in computer graphics and animation. This paper describes a new method for splining quaternions so that they can be used with keyframe animation. We also show that quaternions, although up to now solely used for animation purposes, can be used succesfully in the field of modelling and rendering and we prove that we can construct a significantly faster rendering algorithm with the use of quaternions.

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© 1988 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Pletincks, D. (1988). The Use of Quaternions for Animation, Modelling and Rendering. In: Magnenat-Thalmann, N., Thalmann, D. (eds) New Trends in Computer Graphics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-83492-9_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-83492-9_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-83494-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-83492-9

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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