Advanced operations with internal structures

The following pages provide descriptions of Panda’s internal representation of vertices and the renderable geometry that uses them, as well as instructions for directly reading or manipulating this data.

This is an advanced topic of Panda3D and is not necessary for ordinary model rendering and animation, but the advanced user may find this information useful.

• How Panda3D Stores Vertices and Geometry
  • GeomVertexData
  • GeomVertexFormat
  • GeomPrimitive
  • Geom
  • GeomNode
  • BoundingVolume
• Procedurally Generating 3D Models
  • Defining your own GeomVertexFormat
  • Pre-defined vertex formats
  • Creating and filling a GeomVertexData
  • Creating the GeomPrimitive objects
  • Putting your new geometry in the scene graph
• Other Vertex and Model Manipulation
  • Reading existing geometry data
  • Modifying existing geometry data
  • Using memoryviews
  • MeshDrawer
  • More about GeomVertexReader, GeomVertexWriter, and GeomVertexRewriter
  • Writing 3D Models out to Disk
• Matrix Representation
  • The Problem
  • The Coefficients are Derivatives
  • What to Call the Two Ways of Storing a Matrix
  • What to Call the Two Ways of Printing a Matrix
  • The Four Possibilities
  • The Terms “Column Major” and “Row Major”
  • Panda Notation
  • Interoperability with OpenGL and DirectX