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Thanks for the questions. Indeed many animation libraries store the quaternion and translation as separate components. There are a few reasons I use dual-quater
by ninepoints 7y ago
Thanks for the questions. Indeed many animation libraries store the quaternion and translation as separate components. There are a few reasons I use dual-quaternions in my own code. First, because I can "slerp" them, this means that when I compress keyframes, and can perform better quality fits (potentially less error and fewer keyframes needed). The dual-quaternion has uses in skinning which I'm sure you're aware of, but if the base transformation is a dual quaternion, I can more efficiently morph neighboring vertices as well (I've ported the dual-quaternion application to shader code as well). One optimization that GA makes clear is the ability to factor out terms when applying a dual quaternion to a number of entities all at once which makes it almost as efficient as a quat-translation while conserving energy as well.
Finally, the dual-quat representation is beneficial when modeling kinematic motion specifically (not necessarily artist-authored) which can be useful in contexts beyond games (e.g. robotics, deep-learning, computer vision), but also inverse kinematics (which unfortunately I haven't had time to write about yet)