3D engines are very present in web applications these days. With ActionScript3 become possible develop faster 3d lib and, with that, the technology has spread widely thru the web. Today we have a lot of elaborated 3d engines like Papervision3D, Away3D, Sandy3D, Five3D, Alternativa and many others.
Their usage is quite simple, once that all calculations behind any lib is automatic e independent of the knowledge of the developer. But I think that is extremely important understand what happen in any application, lib or class, for the knowledge or to improve something that has already been created.
Despite the way that is built, any 3d engine have some elements in common, one of them is what we call Transformation Matrix. Yes, matrices. That thing that we learn on school and we don’t have any ideia of what it is until the day that we became developers. But before understand what is a transformation matrix, we must understand what it does. And for this we’ll think in a 3d engine in a basic way.
For example, let’s take a cube as a group of 8 connected points:
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