POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.advanced-users : Use Slope pattern for Planting distribution? : Re: Use Slope pattern for Planting distribution? Server Time
6 Oct 2024 15:21:22 EDT (-0400)
  Re: Use Slope pattern for Planting distribution?  
From: Warp
Date: 14 Dec 2006 14:26:55
Message: <4581a57f@news.povray.org>
Thomas de Groot <t.d### [at] internldotnet> wrote:
> OK. There is something that I am missing here obviously. When you mention 
> normalize, I think normal. To tell the truth, I have never thought about the 
> difference

  Despite the similarity in the names of the terms, a normal vector and a
normalized vector talk about two different things:

  - A normal vector is a vector perpendicular to a surface (or line in 2D)
at a certain point.
  - A normalized vector is a vector of length 1.

  Thus a normalized normal vector is a normal vector of length 1.

  The dot product returns values between 0 and 1 only if the two vectors
are normalized.
  (More specifically, the dot product is the product of the lengths of
the two vectors and the cosine of the angle between them. Naturally if
both lengths are 1, the result is just the cosine.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp


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