Maths - I was always told I'd never need it...

Development Programming & Scripting C++
1

Hey Guys!

So I always had a firm belief that unless I was going into a scientific or math based field,
that I would never need Calculus or Trig, or whatever you wanna call it.

But now, I can not for the life of me remember how to calculate a 3D curve…
Nor do the documents on Google make any sense…
This!](http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/Classes/CalcIII/VectorArcLength_files/eq0008MP.gif) Just confuses me…

I don’t suppose anyone could tell me the gist of it like I’m a five year old?

Thanks a bunch!

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2

What you are trying to do exactly?

:slight_smile:

Rama

3

Hey Rama!

I’m trying to calculate a smooth curve between 3 simple points,
a bit like how a spline operates. :3

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4

Looks to me that that formula calculates the length of the derivative (tangent?) of a 3 dimensional function. Not exactly sure how you need that. If you want to draw smooth curves, checkout http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bézier_curve. These do not require calculus.

5

Hi Loken!!

you dont have to do any work Loken

Check out InterpCurve.h

I used this to re-implement splines in my own project

as per this video:

6

Hey Rama!

I wish I had seen this earlier!

I ended up writing my own function in my static library,
which allows me to pass in my 2 points and their handles,
and it returns a point at a specified point using the 0-1 lerp method.

All that math :frowning: FOR NOTHING :frowning:
Awk well! At least I’m learning!

Maybe this one is better than mine.
Mine has far too many calcs per tick, and I’m not overly happy with it.

Thanks a bunch as always!

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