At one point all of this seemed like common knowledge in software because Carmack, Abrash and Hecker (among many others) were working in the open on games and discovery. Kind of funny that someone had to reinvent from first principles!
At one point all of this seemed like common knowledge in software because Carmack, Abrash and Hecker (among many others) were working in the open on games and discovery. Kind of funny that someone had to reinvent from first principles!
The issue is it’s hard to find a good simple explanation. If you search you’ll more often then not get either a bad explanation, one that doesn’t work for you personally but might for others, one that’s too mathy and assumed too much prior knowledge, etc…
Now-a-days maybe you can ask an LLM for something exactly at your level and anything you don’t get you can ask it that too. That wasn’t the case until recently and many still don’t use them
” that’s too mathy” I’m not really sure there is any remedy to the fact computer graphics is based on math.
I suck at math myself so can relate. But actually the math you need to learn to be effective at graphics is mostly about understanding _a very small subset_ of a bunch of concepts (such as how 2x2, 3x3 and 4x4 matrices work) and one is set for life,
so I think it’s good to give the formal mathemathical explanation and then Gilbert Strang what it all means.
One just needs to pick any book on computer graphics written in the past 40 years or so.
But camera transform is so unintuitive it really helps if the student tries to work it out for themselves why it works.
For me it’s really weird anyone would write code and _not_ start from reading all of introductory computer graphics literature because it’s so awesome but I realize I’m the outlier here.