Hands-On C++ Game Animation Programming

Chapter 5: Implementing Transforms

In this chapter, you will implement a structure that holds position, rotation, and scale data. This structure is a transform. A transform maps from one space to another space. Position, rotation, and scale could also be stored in a 4x4 matrix, so why would you want to use an explicit transform struct instead of a matrix? The answer is interpolation. Matrices don't interpolate well, but transform structures do.

Interpolating between two matrices is difficult because rotation and scale are stored in the same components of the matrix. Because of this, interpolating between two matrices doesn't yield the result you would expect. Transforms solve this problem by storing the position, rotation, and scale components ...