Below is a picture of a polar coordinate point at (3, 45) where 3 is the distance and 45 is the angle. Just like you probably expect, the angle defines what direction the point is in, and the radius defines how far away it is. The distance is called the radial coordinate, or the radius and the angle is called the angular coordinate or polar angle. Polar coordinates have two components – a distance and an angle – and represent a point in 2d space.

Converting Polar Coordinates to Cartesian (2D)

Amazingly, this time around, it finally clicked and is now an intuitive thing so I figured I’d share the explanation that makes most sense to me in case it helps anyone else. I was recently implementing an orbit camera for a raytracer on ( Raytraced Refraction) and when my copy/pasting wasn’t working, I was forced to take a deeper look at why it wasn’t working. In any case, I usually work with spherical or polar coordinates only on rare occasions, so whenever i do, the process usually is to google the equations, drop them in, and move on with my life. How about you… do you have to do a juggling act like this to keep sharp and stay effective as a game (or non-game) programmer? I’d be interested to hear how others deal with this sort of thing with such a large knowledge space that we work in. But, of course, we have a finite amount of time, so can’t always spend the time needed to get to that level on every single topic. Also, if you put in the time investment to learn something to where it becomes intuitive, that frees up neurons to make room for other stuff. If you can find the commonalities between things that can help some – like understanding how encryption, hashing, pseudo random number generators and chaos theory all overlap – or how skeletal animation blending and audio synthesis are both trying to be continuous waves above all else. I find that you sort of have to triage what you learn and what you choose to keep fresh in your mind, which can be a challenge sometimes.

It’s a blessing in that you are seldom bored, but also sometimes a curse in that there almost always is a better way to do something, and that you would know about it if you had spent your time learning X instead of Y 😛 You could spend your entire life learning things and never know it all. As a game developer there is just too much darn stuff to learn.

Polar to cartesian in python