Excellent and Clever Teaching Tool

This is by far the nerdiest thing I’ve ever seen done with a spreadsheet because it uses the capabilities of the software in a way probably not envisioned in its creation. However, it’s definitely only something that is meant to be an exercise and demonstration in how basic 3D rotation ‘works’ in graphics software and games by showing the math involved in each rotation axis. In the OGAL_demo.xls if you ‘step through’ the VB macro, you can watch the triangles; 2 per side; as all 3D flat surfaces have, position themselves (almost painfully) at each iteration of the program loop.

Now imagine a curved surface made up of several hundred triangles where not only the position of each triangle point needs to be calculated, but also each normal vector for each and every triangle for use in rendering the graduated shading effects we’ve come to know and love in modern 3D graphics. Several hundred triangles on a curved surface is fairly low resolution these days, by the way. Then there's texturing.

Despite these limits, this is a great teaching tool showing the basics of 3D graphics rotation, and gives an appreciation for the math and calculating power needed in today’s graphic software and video cards.

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