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From: nyet@nntp-server.caltech.edu (n liu)
Newsgroups: rec.games.programmer,alt.msdos.programmer,comp.os.msdos.programmer
Subject: Re: 3D Rotation
Message-ID: <1991Apr9.001941.12548@nntp-server.caltech.edu>
Date: 9 Apr 91 00:19:41 GMT
References: <1991Apr05.224711.12750@lynx.CS.ORST.EDU> <1991Apr5.201714.29494@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> <41021@cup.portal.com> <1991Apr8.181450.15309@cs.cornell.edu>
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
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ressler@CS.Cornell.EDU (Gene Ressler) writes:

>easy to program from.  S/H is in Foley and Van Dam, Fundamentals
>of interactive computer graphics (and many others).  They do a chapter
>on `the graphics pipeline' that is _very_ worthwhile study if you're doing
>3D imaging.  These guys virtually invented computer flight simulations; they
>know what they're talking about.

>Having said this, I gladly admit that programs like MS Flight simulator
>play all kinds of games to get around the expensive (read floating point)
>computation of the above algorithms.  But you can't understand the games
>until you've got the rules.

I actually have one of those pipelines described in Foley & Van Dam that
does pretty much any wireframe 3D modeling I could ever want, but it's
a bit slow for real animation... unless you have a quick 386 with fpu.
So, what i want to know is, where is a good place to start to learn those
integer math tricks MS et al use?  Also, if anybody is interested in
the pipeline, i can mail it to them - its kinda convoluted and there's no
documentation or comments (hey, i'm sorry - what do i look like; a CS major?)
but if you're willing to sit down and untangle it, it might be useful.

Two "front ends" are available - one is an interactive line-driven renderer
which will also read in data (got lots of sample stuff for it); cli.c
the other is a little animation front end that bounces and rotates red/blue
3d stuff on screen; danime.c

again, docs are sparse, so use at your own risk!
The syntax for the cli is pretty much what James Blinn wrote about in 
some random Computer Graphics treatises.. i have photocopies of those
lying around somewhere.