Principal Technical Artist
If you’re thinking “I’ve herd of Tangents before”, and you’ve not spent a lot of time animating or learning calculus, then there’s a good chance it’s from Tangent Space Normal Maps. In this short I’m going to take a quick look at tangent space, and relate it back to the Cross Product.
In my last “Math For 3D Artists” post, I took a look at the Dot Product which is a simple, and immediately useful for artists, especially when writing shaders.
The Cross Product however is a powerful tool in the 3D rendering pipeline responsible for a lot of triangle calculation which makes what 3D artists do, work. In this post I’m going to explore what the Cross Product enables, and a more accessible use case for artists in Shader Graph.
The Dot Product is a useful little function which is helpful for game artists to understand. In this post I’m going to look at at what the Dot Product is, how it’s used, and more importantly, what it’s useful for.