About View Objects
A view object (or, more briefly, a view) is a type of QuickDraw 3D object that maintains the information necessary to render a single scene or image of a model. A view also maintains the information necessary to perform picking, calculate a bounding box or sphere, and write data to a file. A view is essentially a collection of a single camera, a (possibly empty) group of lights, a draw context, and a renderer. As you've seen, a camera defines a point of view onto a three-dimensional model and a method of projecting the model onto a two-dimensional view plane. The group of lights provides illumination on the objects in the model. The draw context defines the destination of the two-dimensional image, and the renderer determines the method of generating the image from the model.A view is of type
TQ3ViewObject
, which is one of the four main subclasses of QuickDraw 3D objects. The structure of a view object is opaque; you must create and manipulate views solely using functions supplied by QuickDraw 3D (for example,Q3View_New
).