It all starts naively simple, you make your cube/quad thing add a transform node and translate, scale, and even rotate and it all works in such an obvious and simple way, right? You tell yourself you got this and as self procalimed master of all things transforms carry on with your day.
We’ve all been there, maybe you are there right now, but surely and inevitably for all of us, sooner rather than later comes the day when you need to do something a bit more complicated, maybe there is already another transform you have no control over and you want to “add to it”, or change it, or combine it with your own and well, what one day seemed simple and obvious quickly turns into an obscure trial and error process which leaves us confused and often frustrated.
When and if you do decide to dig into it you get confronted with 4x4 transformation matrices, quaternions, euler angles and mentions of linear algebra. “Why did I not pay attention in maths class?” you ask yourself, “I never thought I would actually need this stuff”.
Well, welcome to the club!
Having experienced this myself all too recently, and through the process of finding support in our community to slowly get a hold of this topic, an initiative was born: Transforming Brains.
The name cleverly coined by @motzi reflects the spirit him, @baxtan and myself intend to bring into this. Our aim for now is to collect as much learning material around the topics of transformations, linear algebra, quaternions, coordinate systems, right and left handedness and the like.
Coming up with a well curated and organized index of learning material is a first step, which we hope will be eventually followed by webinars and video tutorials.
At this point I would like to invite you all to join the initiative, do drop a post here with any valuable links, book names or other resources you may know about, let us know if you have ideas for webinars and tutorials, and of course if you are having transform troubles, we are here to help!
We also have created a chatroom for the same purpose, join us here if you’d rather chat about it: https://app.element.io/#/room/#TransformingBrains:matrix.org
So yeah, there is that.
Over and out!