LearnOpenGL 总结记录<3> Matrices, Coordinate Systems

OpenGL 的 矩阵乘法

矩阵在左边。

 

坐标系

To transform the coordinates in one space to the next coordinate space we’ll use several transformation matrices of which the most important are the model, view and projection matrix. Our vertex coordinates first start in local space as local coordinates and are then further processed to world coordinates, view coordinates,clip coordinates and eventually end up as screen coordinates. The following image displays the process and shows what each transformation does:

Local space

Local space is the coordinate space that is local to your object, i.e. where your object begins in. Imagine that you’ve created your cube in a modeling software package (like Blender). The origin of your cube is probably at (0,0,0) even though your cube might end up at a different location in your final application. Probably all the models you’ve created all have (0,0,0) as their initial position. All the vertices of your model are therefore in local space: they are all local to your object.

The vertices of the container we’ve been using were specified as coordinates between -0.5 and 0.5with 0.0 as its origin. These are local coordinates.

 

World space

If we would import all our objects directly in the application they would probably all be somewhere stacked on each other around the world’s origin of (0,0,0) which is not what we want. We want to define a position for each object to position them inside a larger world. The coordinates in world space are exactly what they sound like: the coordinates of all your vertices relative to a (game) world. This is the coordinate space where you want your objects transformed to in such a way that they’re all scattered around the place (preferably in a realistic fashion). The coordinates of your object are transformed from local to world space; this is accomplished with the model matrix.

The model matrix is a transformation matrix that translates, scales and/or rotates your object to place it in the world at a location/orientation they belong to. Think of it as transforming a house by scaling it down (it was a bit too large in local space), translating it to a suburbia town and rotating it a bit to the left on the y-axis so that it neatly fits with the neighboring houses. You could think of the matrix in the previous tutorial to position the container all over the scene as a sort of model matrix as well; we transformed the local coordinates of the container to some different place in the scene/world.

 

View space

The view space is what people usually refer to as the camera of OpenGL (it is sometimes also known as thecamera space or eye space). The view space is the result of transforming your world-space coordinates to coordinates that are in front of the user’s view. The view space is thus the space as seen from the camera’s point of view. This is usually accomplished with a combination of translations and rotations to translate/rotate the scene so that certain items are transformed to the front of the camera. These combined transformations are generally stored inside a view matrix that transforms world coordinates to view space. In the next tutorial we’ll extensively discuss how to create such a view matrix to simulate a camera.

 

Clip space

At the end of each vertex shader run, OpenGL expects the coordinates to be within a specific range and any coordinate that falls outside this range is clipped. Coordinates that are clipped are discarded, so the remaining coordinates will end up as fragments visible on your screen. This is also where clip space gets its name from.

Because specifying all the visible coordinates to be within the range -1.0 and 1.0 isn’t really intuitive, we specify our own coordinate set to work in and convert those back to NDC as OpenGL expects them.

To transform vertex coordinates from view to clip-space we define a so called projection matrix that specifies a range of coordinates e.g. -1000 and 1000 in each dimension. The projection matrix then transforms coordinates within this specified range to normalized device coordinates (-1.0, 1.0). All coordinates outside this range will not be mapped between -1.0 and 1.0 and therefore be clipped. With this range we specified in the projection matrix, a coordinate of (1250, 500, 750) would not be visible, since the x coordinate is out of range and thus gets converted to a coordinate higher than 1.0 in NDC and is therefore clipped.

This viewing box a projection matrix creates is called a frustum and each coordinate that ends up inside this frustum will end up on the user’s screen. The total process to convert coordinates within a specified range to NDC that can easily be mapped to 2D view-space coordinates is called projection since the projection matrix projects 3D coordinates to the easy-to-map-to-2D normalized device coordinates.

Once all the vertices are transformed to clip space a final operation called perspective division is performed where we divide the x, y and z components of the position vectors by the vector’s homogeneousw component; perspective division is what transforms the 4D clip space coordinates to 3D normalized device coordinates. This step is performed automatically at the end of each vertex shader run. （这里就是所谓的 perspective division）

It is after this stage where the resulting coordinates are mapped to screen coordinates (using the settings of glViewport) and turned into fragments.

The projection matrix to transform view coordinates to clip coordinates can take two different forms, where each form defines its own unique frustum. We can either create an orthographic projection matrix or aperspective projection matrix.

 

Right-handed system

By convention, OpenGL is a right-handed system. What this basically says is that the positive x-axis is to your right, the positive y-axis is up and the positive z-axis is backwards. Think of your screen being the center of the 3 axes and the posi- tive z-axis going through your screen towards you. The axes are drawn as follows: