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We put up our Christmas Tree yesterday, which means lots of Christmas Tree pictures! Normal, boring, regular image (the best kind).
This image illustrates two important features of 3D space in CG (computer graphics) applications:
3D surfaces in CG programs are represented by flat polygons called faces (displayed as colored circles here).
In addition to shape and color attributes, each face has 2 properties which orient the face:
1. Normals, which determine the orientation of the face relative to light source(s).\
2. Face Winding, which determines whether the viewer (or viewpoint) is currently seeing the "front" or the "back" of a particular face.
Normal orientation and face orientation work together with underlying "material" color properties to determine the amount of color reflected from a particular viewpoint and distance. At a simple level, these calculations result in differential shading of surfaces pointing in different directions, a key visual clue allowing us to see this scene in "3D".