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I think it can be a helpful way to think about it for some beginners, but yeah, it's not strictly true. I'd say "the goal of 3D APIs is to display 3D images on
by Jasper_ 8y ago
I think it can be a helpful way to think about it for some beginners, but yeah, it's not strictly true. I'd say "the goal of 3D APIs is to display 3D images on your 2D screen", and that means that, at the far end of the pipeline, after you've projected and flattened everything, you have 2D concepts: triangle rasterization and fragment shaders operate entirely in 2D, for instance. The only remaining "3D"-esque thing, which is perspective-correct attribute interpolation, happens in screen space.
- andrewmcwatters 8y agoThat's cute but it's also about as relevant as saying cooking is just chemistry. You're not wrong but you're also ignoring the artistry, taste, tradition, image, class, and every other aspect of cooking. If at the end of the day cooking is chemistry, well then serve me up some atoms.
- Jasper_ 8y agoAll I'm saying is that it's a way of thinking about it. It clearly helped the author think about "rasterized 2D screen-space triangles" rather than "something something 3D". They clearly had some misconception and "WebGL is a 2D API" helped clear it up. I'm not saying it's the one true way to think about 3D graphics APIs, or that it's wrong or right.
- vidarh 8y agoThe point kinda is that Webgl is closer to the chemistry than the cooking: It's a fairly low level API. It doesn't offer you a scene graph or otherwise let your work with 3D objects. It doesn't care if the vertex shader input is 3d coordinates, or anything else. It doesn't handle the camera for you, and so on. It offers you the essential elements you need to compose 3d abstractions (or you can use it for something else), or for a library to run on top of. Or you can choose to use it directly, but then you are in effect cooking with a chemistry set.