Skeletal animation with quaternions

[Koen Samyn]

Hi,

As I was working on some code for real time character animations I wrote some documentation to help me understand it better (a little trick that never fails me). 

Anyhow the result is a 4 page pdf tutorial on how to rotate the different bones of a skeleton efficiently. Use it any way you want, remarks are always welcome (English is not my native language so go easy on me).

Erratum  1: made a mistake on page 4, third translation should be : Translation : T3 = (W-E)*q2*q1 + T2
Erratum 2 : changed total rotation to global rotation

Koen

[Spasi]

I wish I had such a nice explanation available when I was implementing skeletal animation. Well done, nicely written.

(English is not my native language so go easy on me)

Same here, but I have a little terminology correction: "total" transformation/rotation should be "global". So, for example, you have the local rotation around the parent and the global rotation as seen by the world. That's the term used by most DCC apps.