rcscr / mulder3d

Polygon-based real-time 3D graphics engine in Java

Mulder3d

A polygon-based real-time 3D graphics engine in Java.

Motivation

Named after Special Agent Fox Mulder from the X-Files, for his relentless search for the truth.

Scully : I'm just constantly amazed by you. You're working down here in the basement, sifting through files and transmissions that any other agent would just throw away in the garbage.

Mulder : Well, that's why I'm in the basement, Scully.

Scully : You're in the basement because they're afraid of you, of your relentlessness, and because they know that they could drop you in the middle of the desert and tell you the truth is out there, and you'd ask them for a shovel.

Mulder3d represents my relentless attempt at developing a working 3D graphics engine. In those glory college days, I would stay up all night programming, and go to sleep when the birds began singing - only to continue dreaming in code...

Scully : Don't you ever just want to stop? Get out of the damn car... settle down and live something approaching a normal life?

Mulder : This is a normal life.

And it wasn't all in vain: some ten years later, I finally managed to implement perspective-correct texture mapping. See below.

Examples

The "Hello World" of computer graphics, the Utah Teapot, composed of 530 vertex-normal pairs and 1024 faces.

(Teapot coordinates taken from http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/data/obj/obj.html)

Mesh

Flat-shaded

Gouraud-shaded

Textured (perspective-correct)

Lit by multiple colored light sources

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I WANT TO BELIEVE