Building a 3D Home Space: Geometry
By Andrea L. Ames
Last month, you got a taste of what VRML can do, and you're ready to build your first VRML world: a 3D home space. This month, we'll begin by building the basic, external geometry for a simple home world. We'll also color and texture the geometry. In later columns, we'll add lights and sounds, and make the home world dynamic and interactive using anchors, sensors, and animation. We'll focus first on planning your world and building the basic home-space geometry, step by step:
- Design your virtual home space, including textures.
- Build the individual pieces of geometry.
- Put all the pieces together.
The Best-Laid Plans
I began my virtual home space with a simple plan in mind: a room with a wood floor, a door, and painted walls. For the wood floor, I needed a wood texture, and for the room itself, I needed VRML geometry nodes. I wondered whether to build those nodes myself using a text editor or to use a VRML authoring/modeling application instead. After a bit of struggling along the authoring-tool route, I opted to build them myself. (For a description of my adventures with the beta version of ParaGraph's Internet 3D-Space Builder v2.0, see "Using Authoring Tools." In future columns, I will experiment with and review other tools.)
Before I began building the geometry of my room, I decided to build it in pieces, because the pieces of modular VRML worlds can be reused easily.
