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I know that there are 3 techniques to draw 3D objects: (1) Wireframe Modeling and rendering (2) Additive Modeling (3) Subtractive Modeling

Am I correct?

What formula or algorithm can I use to draw a 3D Sphere?

I am using a low-level library named WinBGIm from colorado university.

For example, how to draw this:

enter image description here

And, this:

enter image description here

  • I feel this is a very broad question. What exactly do you want to learn that you can't when using one of said low-level graphic APIs? – David Kuri Sep 07 '15 at 11:56
  • @DavidKuri, drawing a 2D geometric primitive (circle or line) in 3D is easy (just need to convert/translate 3D coordinates to 2D coordinates or vice versa). suppose I want to draw a sphere without OpenGL. Where to start from? Just give me a guideline to study. –  Sep 07 '15 at 11:59
  • You mean software rendering? – ratchet freak Sep 07 '15 at 12:02
  • @ratchetfreak, yes. I need to draw a sphere/ellipsoid/or whatever it is on the screen. Rasterization in 3D. –  Sep 07 '15 at 12:03
  • @ratchetfreak, I need to demonstrate 3D algorithms like Z-buffer algorithm. So, first, I need to know how to draw a 3D object in 3D. –  Sep 07 '15 at 12:05
  • @trichoplax, I need to learn both. –  Sep 07 '15 at 12:12
  • @trichoplax, line drawing. I will learn shadows and shading later. –  Sep 07 '15 at 12:16
  • Since this is more than one question, it may help to ask them separately rather than trying to fit them all into one post, which is making this too broad – trichoplax is on Codidact now Sep 08 '15 at 20:23
  • your second image will be much harder to generate than the first. – v.oddou Sep 11 '15 at 02:08
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    Stack Exchange works best when you ask about very specific problems you might encounter in your day to day work/studies. It doesn't work as well for book-length studies. If an answer cannot comfortably fit in the space of a post, it is probably too soon for a Q&A site like this. That is why we close these questions as too broad. – Robert Cartaino Sep 11 '15 at 12:10

1 Answers1

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Scratchapixel has a nice tutorial on writing a basic rasterizer here. Also, you could use the projection algorithm here to get the position of the vertices in screen space, then use Bresenham's algorithm or DDA to draw lines in between. If you want to fill them too you can use scanline (you can find it on Wikipedia).

For ellipsoids, you can either just turn them into a triangle mesh, or the approach here might work, although I haven't tried it.

The Z-Buffer algorithm is very straightforward, just calculate the distance from the point to the camera and store that somewhere for each pixel, then make sure that that's less than whatever was already there.

Sam
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  • Scratchapixel is definitely the best place to learn about that stuff (2D & 3D). They explain rasterisation and also ray-tracing and everything there is to know around 3D techniques (texturing, how to store polygonal objects in memory, etc.). Really cool website and it's free content. – user18490 Sep 09 '15 at 21:49