[71] Orderly Indices

Another light post due to external factors, but what little work was done is paid for in full by its importance, or some dumb optimistic language like that.

I decided on pursuing some type of an either fully software-based renderer, or some odd hybrid one. An optimization that I know of is to not render faces that are facing away from the camera. This is called back-face culling, and a surface normal is used to tell whether or not a polygon is in fact facing away, and shouldn't be visible.

To make sure I got the theory and concept right, I made a Python script that took an embarrassing amount of time to make for what is literally less than 50 lines:

This code copies the results of the calculation to the clipboard, formatted for use in GeoGebra, an online graphing calculator. The output looks something like this:

When punched into GeoGebra, the resulting graph will look something like this.

the black vector is the result of turning the original surface normal into a unit vector, which is then offset from its origin to the center of the triangle itself for show.

I am in the middle of studying for DMV stuff, so I can't make any promises for next week's progress, but I should at least get some things done in relation to mesh loading.

I also figured out how to use simple Tkinter message boxes and file dialogue windows. So I can use that for whatever intermediary format I'll make for storing mesh vertex info that's easier to parse in C.