Sweet 3D Matrix vibe

Well friends, this assignment is awesome. Instead of barreling right into it, I took my roommate Matt's advice and read 3 chapters in the textbook first. Good idea!! It was great and all very interesting stuff. I started the assignment today and managed to get a whole bunch of it done!! Wahoo!!

For this assignment, I am writing the entire forward graphics pipeline - starting at modeling transformations, then view (camera) transformations, and then 3D line clipping, (near and far planes), and finally the perspective projection transformation. This is totally sweet, I wasn't sure how quickly I'd get going on this but it is really interesting and it's going well.

Today I did all the UI, menus etc. Then I added the Matrix calculations for Translation, Scale and X/Y/Z Rotation. At the moment I am just doing an Orthographic Projection (see picture), so there is no real sense of depth. Note that if you look at this image long enough, it's hard to tell which side of the cube is up! This is somewhat due to the lack of perspective transformation, so it should look pretty sweet when I am done. When I am finished it should look a lot better and the parallel lines that are further away from the viewer should have a more perspective-like effect. We are not allowed to use any OpenGL functions for this, so we just define a square along (+-1, +-1, +-1) and then we have to run the square through a series of transformation matrices before drawing it. Cool stuff!!!


Oooh, 3D square!