OpenGL.org. Joe's Blog: An intro to modern OpenGL. Table of Contents. OpenGL tutorial & 3d engine tutorial. OpenGL:Tutorials:Using Quaternions to represent rotation - GPWik. Sacred Software - Quaternion tutorial. Features - Rotating Objects Using Quaternions. Last year may go down in history as The Year of the Hardware Acceleration. Much of the work rasterizing and texture-mapping polygons was off-loaded to dedicated hardware. As a result, we game developers now have a lot of CPU cycles to spare for physics simulation and other features. Some of those extra cycles can be applied to tasks such as smoothing rotations and animations, thanks to quaternions. Many game programmers have already discovered the wonderful world of quaternions and have started to use them extensively.
Several third-person games, including both TOMB RAIDER titles, use quaternion rotations to animate all of their camera movements. Every third-person game has a virtual camera placed at some distance behind or to the side of the player's character. Because this camera goes through different motions (that is, through arcs of a different lengths) than the character, camera motion can appear unnatural and too "jerky" for the player to follow the action. ANGLE AND AXIS.