In the previous tutorial learning how to write a 3D soft engine from scratch in C#, TS or JS – drawing lines & triangles, we’ve learned how to draw lines & triangles and we really started to see the 3D side our meshes thanks to this wireframe rendering. But we’ve only displayed a cube… And even a simple cube already has 12 faces! Are we going to be forced to handle ourselves all the faces for more complex objects this way? Hopefully not.

image

3D modelers help the collaboration between 3D designers and developers. The designer can use its favorite tools to build his scenes or meshes (3D Studio Max, Maya, Blender, etc.). Then he will export his work into a file that will be loaded by the developers. The developers will finally push the meshes into his real time 3D engine. There are several file formats available on the market to serialize the job done by the artists. In our case, we’re going to use JSON. Indeed, David Catuhe has done an export library for Blender that output a .babylon file using JSON. We’re then going to see how to parse that file and display the meshes in our lovely soft engine.

Blender is a free 3D modeler you can download here: http://www.blender.org/

You can write plug-ins in Python. That’s what we’ve done for the exporter.

1 – Writing the core logic for camera, mesh & device object
2 – Drawing lines and triangles to obtain a wireframe rendering
3 – Loading meshes exported from Blender in a JSON format
4 – Filling the triangle with rasterization and using a Z-Buffer
4b – Bonus: using tips & parallelism to boost the performance
5 – Handling light with Flat Shading & Gouraud Shading
6 – Applying textures, back-face culling and WebGL

In this tutorial, you will learn how to draw lines, what a face is and how cool is the Bresenham algorithm to draw some triangles. Read the rest of this entry »