Lecture: Triangles

Dear students:

The games we play are generally not made of dots and lines. They are made of triangles. Today we start exploring triangles. Thanks to the versatility of vertex buffers, rendering them is not all that different than rendering the points and lines from last week. We'll also have a look at interpolating values across a triangle and moving our models around with transformations.

Silhouette

You read about quilting triangles together to form complex shapes. Let's do a little activity to revisit those ideas. Here's a challenge:

• Draw a polygonal silhouette of some recognizable shape.
• Triangulate it.
• Roughly locate its vertex coordinates in \([-1, 1] \times [-1, 1]\).

We'll take the drawing of one lucky student and turn it into a renderer.

Annulus

There are a couple of other big ideas you read about that we should explore together, especially interpolation and transformations. Let's explore them by reverse engineering this scene:

TODO

Here's your list of things to do before we meet next:

See you next time.