Summary

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This chapter completes the process of setting up a 3D rendering environment. This chapter covered the different types of spaces that are used in 3D graphics. You now know that you can use spaces for rendering. You also defined a camera coordinate system that's used to render the final image. The camera can move and rotate freely without any rendering problems. You've declared three vectors that track the offset in rotations that are used to generate local X, Y, and Z axes for the camera. You can now load in the scene using an ASCII file.

By importing the scene from a text file, you can write a converter that converts almost any major format into the custom format. This increases speed and efficiency because all your scenes can be carefully constructed and preserved as a file. This is wonderful because you have your own file format that reads in the assets of the scene. You can read in the camera and any number of lights, spheres, and triangles . You have a few variables that are used to count the amount of triangles and spheres that are loaded into the scene. With this new information, you are stepping closer and closer to implementing photon mapping. The only step left to do now is to incorporate a rendering algorithm, which is discussed in the next chapter.

If you're a bit tired of reading without any results, please bear with me. In the following chapters, you'll learn to put it all together!

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