Xah's Edu Corner: Introduction to 3D Graphics Programing

[Xah Lee]

Of Interest:

Introduction to 3D Graphics Programing
http://xahlee.org/3d/index.html

Currently, this introduction introduces you to the graphics format of
Mathematica, and two Java Applet utilities that allows you to view them
with live rotation in a web browser. Also, it includes a introductory
tutorial to POV-Ray.

Once you understand any one of these pages, you can use your favorite
programing language to start doing 3D Graphics Programing.

In the coming months, i will also introduce the .obj format that are
used by many geometric modeling programs. And, a tutorial on how to use
Python (or Perl, lisp) to do 3D Graphics programing, by setting up
functions that spits out any of 3D-Geometry Formats (such as
Mathematica Graphics or POV-Ray or .inc).

These are the imminent plans for the coming weeks. Other potential
subjects are introduction or tutorials on various utilities or
programing lang libraries that does conversion between different 3D
graphics formats, dedicated tutorial on how to generate mathematical
surfaces, more elaborate study on POV-Ray's abilities and sample cases,
etc.

The focus of these pages, will be 3D-Graphics programing with the goal
of Algorithmic Mathematical Art.
(see
http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/t1/20040113_cmaci_larcu.html )

In particular, we focus on creating geometric objects and their
arrangement that are esthetic in a mathematical way. (for example,
regular tilings in 3D, nested structures in 3D, symmetric structures in
3D, elaborate 3D maze tunnels, beehive sculpting, regular polyhedrons
and their decorations, projection and slices of higher dimensional
symmetries, 3D-manifolds ... etc.) This mathematical esthetic is
opposed to, for example, rendering techniques or technologies (e.g.
fogs, sceneries, fast algorithms...etc) that are quite common in
computer graphics literatures.

  Xah
  xah at xahlee.org
∑ http://xahlee.org/