3D Graphics & Audio - 3D Graphics is about displaying a game world on a screen as quickly and as realistically as possible. This needs to be quick, because game are like movies; what looks like smooth motion is really just lots of still images displayed in rapid succession. Unlike a movie, the still images in a game are different each time the game is played as the player can do different things and go different places

A game world or virtual world is a description of a the game environment inside the computer. This description is made up up of millions of points, lines and planes all in 3-dimentions (3D). 3D Graphics is a branch of applied mathematics.

In order to display this world on to a screen we need to do the following tasks;

1. Take a mathematical 'photograph' of the world from the position of the camera. This is done by applying matrices to millions of points in the world

2. Figure out which parts of the world will be visible on screen; some part will not be visible because they are hidden behind another object, some items are invisible as they are too far to the left or right of the camera. This is done with applied geometry

3. Determine how bright or dark all the elements of the world are based on how much light is falling on them from light sources in the world (e.g. sun, bulbs, flames, etc.). This is calculated using vectors.

4. Take all the information calculated in the 3 steps above and quickly draw it on to a computer screen as a series of a million little squares of colour called pixels

5. Repeat steps 1-4 above 60 times a second

As a graphics programmer, you will be responsible for instructing the computer on how to perform all of the above using a programming language like C++