3d Software Rendering : The Journey....

Miscellaneous Topics
#1

I think a few people here have done some software rendering and I’m doing/attempting it for the learning experience.

I’ve had a series of revelations about 3d gfx over the past few months while working on my renderer. I was wondering if anyone else has experienced this?

  1. You realize “Oh, thats why OpenGL does things that way!”

  2. Then you realize that triangle drawing is about 10% of the work involved in 3d.

  3. Then you realize, for a mesh it would be so much easier to just have an array of verts, an array of normals and an array texture coordinates instead of storing each value in a polygon object; ahhh vertex arrays…

Just today I was noticing that the ms3d file format stores every vertex normal multiple times, very wasteful (or maybe there’s a reason but I just haven’t had that revelation yet…)

#2

Hi
The reason for that one is so that vertecies that join two objects together can have different normals, they only share the normal if the object is smoothed. If you want a crease to show then you must have different normals. and yes, I think most of us have had those thoughts when starting off :slight_smile:

Endolf