“Average” of multiple quaternions?

Question

I\'m trying to make the switch from matrices to quaternions for skeletal animation in my OpenGL program, but I\'ve encountered a problem:

Given a number of unit quat

Answer 1

With quaternions you can do same thing, but with small correction: 1. Negate quaternion before averaging if its dot product with previous sum is negative. 2. Normalize average quaternion, a the end of averaging, if your library works with unit quaternions.

The average quaternion will represent approximately average rotation (max error about 5 degree).

WARNING: Average matrix of different orientations can be broken if rotations too different.