While working with Blender it’s easy to forget what a math processing powerhouse it really is. It’s all hidden behind buttons and windows, but behind the screens there’s a LOT of calculus going on. I ran into an article called ‘Blender’s Orientation Matrix’ by Luma (the makers of the game Club Silo) which kind of puts things in perspective again.
From the introduction of the article:
It is often necessary to get some sense of the orientation of an ob ject for some game purpose. In Blender’s Game Engine, the only information available is the orientation matrix, a rather intimidating 3 × 3 matrix of numbers, which seems hard to interpret and use. In this tutorial, I describe how the matrix works, and how it can be used for some common tasks. I also give Python code that implements most of the algorithms described here.
I have a degree in physics and math like this used to be (note the past tense) easy: I had tensor matrices for breakfast! However, just browsing through this paper was enough to re-install some respect for the Blender developers into me ;-)
Get the article from the ‘Programming Tutorials’ page on the Luma website (and while you’re there, check out some of their other cool stuff).
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