Wire-Frame Graphics

Abstract

The last chapter showed how the graphics facilities provided by Windows 98 can be applied to generate 2D bitmap graphics — this chapter continues the exploration of new graphical algorithms by creating wire-frame images of 3D objects. Indeed this is the first step in producing a graphical representation of an entire virtual world — the remaining chapters in the book continue to develop this idea. The key topics covered here include:

• polygon representation of 3D objects

• the OBJECT and POLYGON classes

• capturing a 3D image with a SCENE object

• line-drawing and line-clipping algorithms

• managing a virtual world with a WORLD object