| Out of curiosity, why? Perspective projection is based off of an old insight from hundreds of years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinhole_camera Projective geometry and the perspective projection matrix (extrinsic and intrinsic parameters of your modeled camera) is basically the "mathified" version of that. Or just "perspective drawing", as artists used it for 100+ years by now. In my opinion, computer graphics is basically applied math (or linear algebra). (You even don't need linear algebra or matrices to render stuff on the screen, but it will be painful to keep track of what's going on.) Math hardly dies off, it seems. Maybe some methods change. Like calculating results by using some geometry and measuring its length. However, unless we don't have any need for projecting something from 3D (world/scene) to 2D (image, monitor, photo, photosensitive sheet, ...), I think we can count on it for a long time. What changes might be some algorithms. Earlier, we used the "edge walking" algorithm to fill out triangles. Now, we use edge equations that tell you whether an image point is inside a triangle or not.
But they do essentially the same, namely, filling out a triangle. Also, things like the Phong model may stick as well. There are other methodologies, that are basically still based off of the pinhole camera model.
In ray tracing, you shoot rays into the scene and check whether they intersect an object. If it intersects, then you color that pixel with the intersected object's defined color. Otherwise, you leave it out and move on pixel by pixel.
So the shooting of the rays from the camera to the scene is basically the reversal of the pinhole camera where light enters the hole and "colors" a photosensitive sheet of paper. At least this is my understanding of it. Just learn math, math, math, and you will be fine. Math is the lingua franca for engineering and science, so learn it and understand the concepts from those other fields/branches. |