CSS 3D

Throughout this course we'll be working with a free program called Blender. In this lesson we'll get to grips with the program so we can use it to understand what's happening in the browser.

To understand the browsers 3D environment we must first demonstrate what we mean by, viewport, orthographic, perspective, perspective origin and much more. If we understand these things before hand it will help us dramatically!

Knowledge of 3D terminologies is important but now we must put it into practice.

Before beginning with CSS we need to have an understanding of the development setup, allowing us to easily jump into projects.

Firstly with any 3D environment we need a viewport that is in perspective mode to get a realistic 3D scene. Then comes the simplest yet most important part which is faces. Faces make up our 3D scene and understanding them is vital!

Continuing on let's have a closer look at the origin and normal side of the face.

In this lesson we'll start building the cube. This will give us an insight into preserve 3D which allows child faces to have their own independent transformations.

Now we need to close this cube up by transforming all the faces into their retrospective position. Then we can have a play with the objects origin and the perspective origin.

Taking it further with our cube example I'm going to add content and style up the individual faces. Then we need to animate the cube.

So lets complete the animation of the cube and whilst in the process of adding movement we'll fix the faces that are not showing content correctly.

The most important part of any 3D scene is making sure it works in older browsers. This lesson will look at fallback support so we don't alienate a large marketshare of older browsers.

The 3D gallery will be an object hierarchy eventually. But firstly we must start with the basic 2D environment and use progressive enhancement to shift into the 3D world.

In this lesson we need to finish creating the top and bottom tier objects so we can have an object hierarchy.

Now let's add motion to our object hierarchy and understand more about the parent and child object relationships.

Adding another level will make things more interesting but it will add complications. By adding another level we now have a three level hierarchy and some new problems to solve. Firstly preserve 3D is important in an object hierarchy to maintain not only independent transformations of the child faces but to preserve perspective within the hierarchy. Then we will also look at animating the top level to make our animation even more interesting.