3D Graphics by Hand: Vertex Tables, Rotations, Camera Space, Perspective Projection, Screen Mapping, Back-Face Culling, Depth Buffers & Flat Shading
Follow a toy cube through the whole rendering pipeline. You will store vertices and faces in tables, scale, rotate and move the model, move it into camera space, project it with a field of view, map it to pixels, cull faces that point away, resolve overlaps with a depth buffer and shade each face by its light angle, with every cell checked as you go.
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About this course
This course follows a toy cube through the 3D rendering pipeline in a spreadsheet, without code or a graphics program. You store the cube as a vertex table and a face table and look up corners with INDEX, then scale, rotate and move it with SIN, COS and RADIANS written out component by component. You move the scene into camera space, project it with a focal factor from the field of view and the aspect ratio, round it to pixel columns and rows and plot it. Then you cull faces with signed areas, keep the nearest fragment per pixel with MINIFS, shade faces with a dot product and check the frame time against a 30 and 60 fps budget.
Lessons
- Points & Meshes: Vertex Tables, Face Tables and Lookups Pro
- Model Transforms: Scale, Rotate, Move – and Why the Order Matters Pro
- Camera Space: Moving the World in Front of the Camera Pro
- Perspective Projection: Field of View, Aspect Ratio and Clipping Pro
- Screen Mapping: From Normalised Coordinates to Pixel Columns and Rows Pro
- Back-Face Culling: Signed Areas Decide Which Faces Are Drawn Pro
- Depth Buffer: The Nearest Fragment Wins Pro
- Capstone – Flat Shading, Grey Levels and the Frame-Time Budget Pro