Lol, shouldn't this blog help artist understand technically aspects instead of adding more confusion ? Reading this discussion, then a simple 1D vector suddenly looks like rocket science. In common sense computer science (no strict mathematically definition) a vector is more or less just a simple container for holding one…
I think it's two directions, positive and negative. We can encode the direction of the 1D vector as the sign of the value of magnitude. The argument here is if a 1D vector is the same as a float value, and I hold the opinion that it isn't. A float is scalar, it can be used to describe the magnitude and direction components…
A float does share these properties, it's a scalar value. A vector, by definition, is a direction and a magnitude. The lowest dimension that makes "useful" sense in is 2, which is a 2D vector, which has two components (in our case, 2 floats, one for each axis of the space). A 1D vector has only one "direction" (the single…
you might want to work on the style of your blog, the lists should be indented, and the sub headlines come out a bit more (or actual text a bit less) magnitude is without sign, you need the sign information on the vector's directional properties, especially if you have multiple components. vec1 == float is prefectly fine…
If the center of the sphere is at (0,0,0), then the left is at (-1,0,0) and the right is at (1,0,0). And i think the renderer i was using didn't like negative colour values. Floats will be covered in the next post as i'll need to explain why they're the result of a dot product of two vectors.
I had the feeling this version of a vector was a little... too mathematical? I knew vectors from highschool physics, and they are still primarily the description of a force for me. Hence direction+magnitude. Might be an idea to explain that in computer graphics, we have vectors, which imply a direction in 3d space, and are…
A 1D vector depends on a coordinate system, has a basis etc. You can scale the coordinate system and still have the magnitude of the vector remain the same (under that coordinate system). A float does not share these properties, it's just the unit (EDIT: it's actually the data type) used to describe the components of…
This is awesome. I love these kinds of articles. I always enjoy how tech writing helps me figure out what I don't know, since trying to explain and clarify something points out all the gaps in my knowledge! In the first blog post, I think it would help to quickly explain what a float is. When you point out that you can…