Chapter 7

Viewing

In the previous chapter, we saw how to use matrix transformations as a tool for arranging geometric objects in 2D or 3D space. A second important use of geometric transformations is in moving objects between their 3D locations and their positions in a 2D view of the 3D world. This 3D to 2D mapping is called a viewing transformation, and it plays an important role in object-order rendering, in which we need to rapidly find the image-space location of each object in the scene.

When we studied ray tracing in Chapter 4, we covered the different types of perspective and orthographic views and how to generate viewing rays according to any given view. This chapter is about the inverse of that process. Here we explain how to use matrix ...

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