3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development, 2nd Edition

9

Geometric Primitives

Triangle man, triangle man.Triangle man hates particle man.They have a fight, triangle wins.Triangle man.

— Particle Man (1990) by They Might Be Giants

This chapter is about geometric primitives in general and in specific.

• Section 9.1 discusses some general principles related to representing geometric primitives.
• Section 9.2, Section 9.3, Section 9.4, Section 9.5, Section 9.6 and Section 9.7 cover a number of specific important geometric primitives, including methods for representing those primitives and some classic properties and operations. Along the way, we’ll present a few C++ snippets.

9.1 Representation Techniques

Let’s begin with a brief overview of the major strategies for describing geometric shapes. For any ...