Chapter 4. Camera

In this chapter, we will learn more about the matrices that we have seen in the source code. These matrices represent transformations that when applied to our scene, allow us to move things around. We have used them so far to set the camera to a distance that is good enough to see all the objects in our scene and also for spinning our Nissan GTS model (Animate button in ch3_Nissan.html). In general, we move the camera and the objects in the scene using matrices.

The bad news is that you will not see a camera object in the WebGL API, only matrices. The good news is that having matrices instead of a camera object gives WebGL a lot of flexibility to represent complex animations (as we will see in Chapter 5, Action). In this chapter, we will learn what these matrix transformations mean and how we can use them to define and operate a virtual camera.

In this chapter, we will:

• Understand the transformations that the scene undergoes from a 3D world to a 2D screen

• Learn about affine...