Book Image

Mathematics for Game Programming and Computer Graphics

By : Penny de Byl
5 (1)
Book Image

Mathematics for Game Programming and Computer Graphics

5 (1)
By: Penny de Byl

Overview of this book

Mathematics is an essential skill when it comes to graphics and game development, particularly if you want to understand the generation of real-time computer graphics and the manipulation of objects and environments in a detailed way. Python, together with Pygame and PyOpenGL, provides you with the opportunity to explore these features under the hood, revealing how computers generate and manipulate 3D environments. Mathematics for Game Programming and Computer Graphics is an exhaustive guide to getting “back to the basics” of mathematics, using a series of problem-based, practical exercises to explore ideas around drawing graphic lines and shapes, applying vectors and vertices, constructing and rendering meshes, and working with vertex shaders. By leveraging Python, Pygame, and PyOpenGL, you’ll be able to create your own mathematics-based engine and API that will be used throughout to build applications. By the end of this graphics focussed book, you’ll have gained a thorough understanding of how essential mathematics is for creating, rendering, and manipulating 3D virtual environments and know the secrets behind today’s top graphics and game engines.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Essential Tools
9
Part 2 – Essential Trigonometry
14
Part 3 – Essential Transformations
20
Part 4 – Essential Rendering Techniques

Graphics and Game Engine Components

No matter which graphics or games development engine you examine, they are built using a very similar architecture, the reason being that they all have to work with the same graphics devices, central processing units (CPUs), and graphics processing units (GPUs) to produce stunning visuals with exceptional frame rates. If you consider the nature of graphical elements that are drawn on a screen, they are also constructed from numerous layers depending on their functionality, dimensions in pixels, coloring, animation, lighting, physics, and user interaction.

In this chapter, we will begin exploring some typical application architectures as we begin to build our own. To enable the drawing of three-dimensional (3D) objects in Python we will use the PyOpenGL package that implements OpenGL (a 3D graphics library). You will learn how each of the graphics components works together to create a scalable and flexible graphics engine.

Herein, we will cover...