I spent a ton of time with this book too! It really lays everything out. The feeling of building something like that from absolute scratch was amazing. I can’t get motivated to do that again these days — ready-made, better implementations are too accessible.
I was 13 at the time, so I struggled with the math (this was pre-internet so I couldn’t just search stuff). I’d never seen matrices and wasn’t able to figure them out from that book. I distinctly remember hitting a wall in the chapter on lighting because it mentioned taking the dot product of two vectors, but I didn’t understand why that would give you the cosine of the angle between them because I’d never heard of the dot product before.
Edit: right at the bottom of page 405. I reread that sentence so many times.
I was 13 at the time, so I struggled with the math (this was pre-internet so I couldn’t just search stuff). I’d never seen matrices and wasn’t able to figure them out from that book. I distinctly remember hitting a wall in the chapter on lighting because it mentioned taking the dot product of two vectors, but I didn’t understand why that would give you the cosine of the angle between them because I’d never heard of the dot product before.
Edit: right at the bottom of page 405. I reread that sentence so many times.