Basic 3D Engine

[pj]

Hi again,

I'm just wanting to know if anyone here knows where I'd be able to go in order to learn the basic operations of a 3D Engine?

I am either after a tutorial, a URL to an opensource engine or a good book where I could start to learn the basics. I am attempting to create an opensource 3D Engine within director, so the tutorial, book or o/s engine should not contain any platform specific operations, and should not rely on any hardware for the 3d routines.

At the moment the engine must include the following features. The ability to create simple polygons, such as squares and spheres, and the ability to map textures/images to the polygons. It should later be able to include shadows, fogging and shading, but as long as it can be expanded to do this then all is good

Once again, any help or assistance here is greatly appreciated!!

Cheers!

Paul

Try
http://www.gamedev.net/hosted/nehe/opengl.asp

Best OpenGL tutorials I ever saw.

[pj]

Thanks for your reply, but unfortunately OpenGl ain't exactly the simplest engine to learn.

I think you missed exactly what I'm trying to do too. Basically I am wanting to write my own 3D Engine, so I therefore need to know the operations behind a 3D Engine (e.g. the matrix calcs and all other operations), and converting the OpenGl Engine to a lingo/director based engine wouldn't be an easy task.

Thanks a bunch for your link though... I will try and work my way though the tutorials there so that I can gain a better understanding of OpenGL, but I am still wanting to find something on a more simple 3D Engine with detailed documentation on the operations and code needed to perform simple 3D operations such as texture/image mapping and the display and rotating/translating of simple polygons such as squares and spheres.

Paul.

[Gorg]

opengl *is not* an engine. It's an API. An interface to the hardware.

A graphics engine uses the API to render its scene.

This consist of much more than opengl. You have to worry about scene management, occlusion culling, etc..

[pj]

Sorry for the mix-up of terms. I will try and be a little more accurate when addressing this list from now on!

What you said Gorg is what I am wanting to do, so if you have any good URL's book titles or online tutorials that can show me how to make an engine, not work within an API then I would be extrememly grateful!

Cheers!

Paul

Some engines for which the source is available on the 'net:

Crystal Space (open source)

Quake 2 and 3 (from id's web site, for mod programmers)

Just try a Google search (or Alta Vista) and you'll get lots of hits.

[Caesar]

You say "simple engine". I can pretty much gurantee you that OpenGL is the easiest way of creating a 3D-engine.

Don't get me wrong. You should at least have some understanding on what takes place under the surface, but writing a software engine is really difficult. OpenGL does a lot of the hard stuff for you (and faster).

[Gorg]

The book that would be the best for you to read are :

Real-time Rendering by Eric Haines and Thomas Moller

Cover efficiently most of things that are related to real-time graphics. They also give a lot of good references to get to the information in more depth.

If you are not a really experienced programmer, I would also suggest Design Patterns by Eric Gamma and Co. This books cover , obviously, design patterns.

Design patterns are simple a formal description of concept like client-server, proxy, observer, etc. Extermely usefull.

A warning about design patterns, though. I've seen people pick it up, read it, and then believe they knew software design. Unless you've screwed up two or three large projects already, you probably don't know software design

Design patterns is an excellent reference for naming those constructs that you keep using over and over, and as reference and common ground when discussing with other people, but it does not teach software design as such. As long as you realize that, it's a great book.

[Gorg]

You are absolutly right. Design pattern is only a reference, just a toolbox. You rarely pick a pattern and use directly.

You must not base your architecture on a pattern, you must think about your architecture and then get the patterns that are the closest to what you need and adapt them to your program.