In order of understanding how geometry is displayed on your computer screen, may it be 2d or 3d, one needs to understand what math people came up with to simplify our life. Basically, every computer programme that displays some kind of geometry/object on your screen probably uses these tricks. In 3d, without this, we would still have only very simple graphics.

We shall not write tens of pages explaining how this math actually works, we shall do a visual presentation of it. All modern graphics hardware, game engines, DirectX, OpenGL already have an encoded matrix helper function. Once you understand what these are, you will simply use matrix functions in order to have the desired effect.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you ever wondered how your desktop/laptop computer calculates and presents all the 3D graphics you see, if you are a beginner and want to learn how – this is the article for you!

It presents basics of how light and surfaces are interacting, the simply presented math (the math is actually quite complex, but presented in “plain english” so anyone can understand) will shed a lot of light on the subject. It also contains functions used by popular shader languages so one can learn to use those too.

In the following series we shall go deeper and deeper into more complex structures of 3D lightning, shaders, optimizations, normal mapping, displacement mapping… and I shall  explain how you should think to achieve to programme your favorite graphics card (may it be NVidia or ATI, they both work just fine) and have the most out of it!

Examples and work is accompanied with NVidia’s Cg shader code, OGRE materials and meshes, so you can implement what you learned right on the spot!

So, let’s dig in!

Read the rest of this entry »