Welcome to the 3rd Dimension. In the "real world" everything is in three dimensions. Basically speaking, we define our world in length, width, and depth. On a piece of paper, or on the computer, we are confined to 2 dimensions (or 2-D for short), length and width.

  How long is something on a computer monitor? How high is it on a sheet of paper? When we talk about 3-D in regards to the computer or a flat picture, we are talking about ways of simulating depth and volume. The "simulation" of the 3rd dimension is often hard to grasp for people, and I couldn't hope to explain it fully in a short primer like this, so instead, I'll give you some practical info about it to get you started. For definitions of terms that are bold, underlined, and italicized, see the glossary page.

First, let's introduce you to a computer generated 3-D object. Let's call her "Rabble" [Figure 1]. Rabble looks as pretty as a picture, doesn't she? Well, Rabble isn't just another pretty face, she's actually a collection of information the computer uses to understand what to draw for you [Figure 2]. As you see below, there's a lot more to Rabble than it seems. Rabble's head is a 3-D object composed of what the computer refers to as faces. A face can be broken down into an even smaller unit called a vertex. Vertices are basically points in 3-dimensional space that combined, let the computer know where a face begins and ends.

 Faces are usually made up of three vertices (sometimes four). Full 3-D objects are made up of lots and lots of faces. The more faces your 3-D object has, the more detailed its shape is, and the slower your computer will go when you're looking at it! You might say Rabble is a LOT of pretty faces (that's a joke!)

Below you can see that Rabble is made up of a good number of faces (a few hundred at least) [Figure 3]. The computer can blend all these faces together and make them look nice and smooth, and then you can add "textures" and colors to the faces to make them resemble surfaces in everyday life. Expert 3-D artists can make 3-D objects so detailed, you couldn't tell them from the real thing!

 In the last few years, a lot of computer software as been created that makes creating and manipulating 3-D objects extremely easy. 3-D characters are generally collections of 3-D objects that together form a person or creature you can pose and/or animate in a 3-D scene. In the next sections, we'll begin to talk about how this can be done.