ABSTRACT
The application stage is a part outside the graphics Application Programming Interface such as OpenGL or Direct3D. There are some basic mathematical and programming notions and concepts important for understanding the potentials of computer graphics. This chapter reviews them and shows what we need in order to write OpenGL rendering code. In order to obtain a rendered image from the source 3-dimensional models, light sources and other parameters, the input data undergoes a series of steps called a graphics pipeline. A graphics pipeline determines the steps and order of their execution to get a two-dimensional (2D) image from a given camera model, set of three-dimensional (3D) objects, light sources, textures, lighting equations and many other data. The goal of computer graphics is creating two-dimensional still images by given three-dimensional data. Another important problem in rendering an image from complex geometric data is that while the data are in 3D-space, the rendered image is a 2D-object.
