3D Graphics Programming with QuickDraw 3D 1.5.4

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.

In addition to these four types of objects that are necessary to render a single image of a model, a view can also contain one or more kinds of shaders. The QuickDraw 3D shading architecture provides a powerful way to modify aspects of an image. QuickDraw 3D supports many kinds of shaders, which are applied at different stages of the process of generating an image of a model. This chapter describes how to attach a shader to a view. For a complete description of the QuickDraw 3D shading architecture and for information on creating an instance of a specific kind of shader, see the chapter "Shader Objects."

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 ).