GPU Pro 5

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3D Engine Design

Welcome to the 3D Engine Design section of this edition of GPU Pro.The

selection of chapters you will find here covers a range of engine design problems.

First, Peter Sikachev, Vladimir Egorov, and Sergey Makeev share their expe-

rience using quaternions in an MMORPG game engine. Their chapter, “Quater-

nions Revisited,” illustrates the use of quaternions for multiple purposes in or-

der to replace bulky 3 × 3 rotation and tangent space matrices throughout the

entire engine, most notably affecting aspects such as normal mapping, generic

transforms, instancing, skinning, and morph targets. The chapter shows the

performance and memory