Basics of a 3D scene in Papervision3D

Before we're ready to program some code for Papervision3D, we need to know a little bit more about 3D in Papervision3D. The following section is meant to give you a better understanding of the code that you will write later in this chapter. Each of these concepts relates directly to classes that are used by Papervision3D. Later in this chapter, these will be used to program your first application. All the object types that will be described are active elements in a 3D scene. Let's have a visualized look at all these objects:

Scene

The scene is the entire composition of 3D objects in a 3D space. Think of it as your stage in Flash with three axes—x, y, and z. Each object that you want to be visible should be added to the scene. If you don't add objects to the scene, they will not appear on your screen.

Camera

You can think of this as a real camera, which is somewhere in 3D space recording activity inside the scene. The camera defines the point of view from...