Someone school me on 3D

talk random
1

If you’d be so kind :smiley:

I like 3D graphics, but I am somewhat of a 3D know nothing.

The polygons that are used natively in 3D environments such as well, console games, direct x, or even Director’s 3D - how are they different to the 3D engines in Flash?

Are the 3D engines in flash cleverly emulating a polygon, or are they essentially the same thing, rendered and created the same way, merely that 3D libraries don’t exist in flash, so someone had to create them?

2

I’m no expert, but aren’t all polygons just “clever emulations”? Anytime you’re looking at “3D” on a 2D screen, it’s just perspective using mathematical trickery.

3

If you put it like that, I guess so. Vector certainly is, so Polygons logically are too.

So I guess, is there a hard and fast rule to what a Polygon actually is, and if so, do the Polygons in Flash’s 3D engines conform to this or?

4

Yes they do. A polygon is just a collection of one or more flat faces defined by 3 or more points in 3d space. I think that’s pretty much how I would define it.

5

Thanks for the info Juggler. That’s interesting.

One of the reasons I was confused, is I’ve heard Flash’s 3D being referred to as fake 3D, but even 3D engines similar to papervision, not just mode 7 style scaling.

So maybe they were simply wrong.

It made me think that a polygon was a certain type of object that exists in a 3D environment, same as vector, and Flash was simply emulating polygons.

Guess not.

6

To be honest i’d challenge anyone to show me a 3D environment that wasn’t “fake” apart from the real world. Maya, 3ds max, houdini, all of them are fake. Sure they do a bloody good job of faking it, but it’s still creating a 2d impression of a 3d environment. I think the fact that flash doesn’t have a built in 3D engine means that people have resorted to bodging 3d effects, and whilst some of them are very good, some of them are very simplified versions of a real 3d simulation, hence people saying they are fake. I haven’t really explored papervision or sandy myself, but they seem pretty accurate.