Foundation ActionScript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move!

Chapter 17. BACKFACE CULLING AND 3D LIGHTING

What we'll cover in this chapter:

• Backface culling

• Depth sorting

• 3D lighting

In Chapter 16, I covered all the basics of modeling 3D solids: how to create the points, lines, and polygons that make up a form, even how to give each polygon a color. But if you recall, you just left that color with a 50% transparency, so you could see right through it. So while it was cool to be able to model complex 3D solids, you're still lacking a lot in terms of realism.

In this chapter, I'm going to remedy that by introducing you to backface culling (not drawing the polygons facing away from you), depth sorting (I covered this a bit in Chapter 15, but we'll take a new look at it in terms of polygons), and 3D lighting. I ...