How to Draw a Sphere Part I, Basic Math
January 1995
Once upon a time (before the invention of ray tracing), I could claim the honor of having drawn more spheres than anybody in the world. This was because of all the moons and planets I drew for the Voyager flyby movies at JPL. I could have drawn spheres by hacking them up into scads of polygons, but that would have been the coward's way out. Instead, I wrote a special-purpose program that was highly optimized for drawing spheres. There are quite a variety of interesting tricks involved in this program, but when I started out to write about them I realized that a whole bunch of matrix ...
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