Chapter 14Project: Phases of the Moon

When you’re done with this chapter, you will

  • Know the most important trick in a 3D programmer’s virtual toolbox

  • Know strategies to make big changes to existing code

  • Understand moon phases better than most people (but not the Toy Story animators)

The retrograde-motion chapter was pretty amazing, but in this chapter we’ll cover something every 3D programmer must learn at some point: how to visualize the moon and its phases. It’ll end up looking like this:

images/moon_phases/when_you_are_done.png

Why is it important to simulate the moon’s phases? First, it’s a simple enough problem—the sun shines on the moon, which revolves around Earth—that lets ...

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