Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Cameras, Rendering, and
Scenes
This chapter focuses on some of the many things you can do with cameras,
rendering, and scenes, as well as interesting combinations of them. Generally
speaking, the camera is an eye point from which a scene is rendered. It is a point in
3D space from which a view of the scene, from a given perspective and field of view,
is captured and rasterized to a texture in the form of pixels. After this, it's rendered
to the screen by being blended and composited on top of any previous renders from
any other cameras. Thus, cameras, rendering, and scenes are intimately connected
processes. In this chapter, we'll see how to animate cameras and build fly-through
animations, move cameras along curved paths, and see how objects can know
whether they are being seen and when they are being seen by any specific camera.
In addition, we'll see how to manually edit and process camera renders to create
a postprocess effect, and we'll also see how to configure orthographic cameras to
render pixel perfect 2D textures for 2D games and graphic user interfaces. So let's
get started.
