July 2007
Intermediate to advanced
448 pages
13h 39m
English
In this chapter:
Deriving from ModelVisual3D 271
The Petzold.Media3D Library 278
Every figure in a 3D scene is composed of triangles, but some figures have more triangles than others, and some figures might have hundreds or even thousands of triangles. The simulation of curved surfaces often requires many triangles, but as you saw toward the end of Chapter 4 even flat surfaces require a subdivision into many triangles if you illuminate them with PointLight or SpotLight.
It's sometimes fun to calculate a curved surface using just a calculator, as I did with the convex surfaces in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5. But as the number of vertices increases, the fun quickly ...
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