Study week day 2

After yesterday's post I started on lesson 2. It all made relative sense, and it was pretty small compared to the first one, which is good I think. I have to admit I just flipped through lesson 2, as the colour stuff isn't of huge interest to me yet; I wanted to make it move! Which is where lesson 3 comes in.

Lesson 3 was neat, and repeatedly drawing the scene makes perfect sense to me ;) I've done stuff like that in Java applets, although this is much cleaner implementation of the code. Java has a nasty flicker which you must compensate for. Basically, what happens in java is when you draw the screen, it's drawn as you processing the code, and not all at once. So, say you try and draw six objects on the screen; first clear the screen, then the first object will get drawn, and second, and so on. This causes a flicker for whatever reason. The solution is called a double buffering Basically, you draw each item to an offscreen image, one at a time, then draw the offscreen image to the onscreen image in one shot. With this, I did not have to worry about stuff like that, or I do, and it's been done for me and I will soon find out. Actually, it's probably happening behind the scenes because it's awesome. A quick google out of curiosity came up with this four posts down, someone gives a good simple explanation for how double buffering works in webgl.

really though, the way the lessons have it worked out, it's a lot like drawing with an x, y and z axis; the z axis is the third dimension, and all you have to do is change this axis at set intervals to make something move. Pretty simple!! or this info has been spoon fed to me, either way, I'm liking it!

The basis for what I accomplished today is reading lesson 3, and played with it a bit; changing the axis of the objects to -1, to make it spin the other way, or making it spin on a different axis. All neat stuff but now I think I'm done with lesson 3 and want to get started on lesson 4 where I get to make a true 3D object spin! Like so.

Also, giles, the author of these wonderful tutorials has been on my blog, which kinda proves the usefulness of blogging, for all those naysayers. I must thank him for his service and help in making these tutorials :)

I also feel like I've given myself very little time to do this, 5 days is not enough, so I'll get as much as I can, and pick up the pieces later. Think of it like getting my feet wet, then splashing wildly around in the water, It's chaos! but it's fun.