Shapes as Environments

Simple shapes will play an important part in the creation of your 3D worlds. You can use them in combination with your terrains or on their own to create entire environments or elements of your environment including the sky, ground, buildings, walls, and much more. Earlier in the book, you learned how to create simple shapes like spheres, cubes, and cylinders. Blitz3D gives you the ability to use any shape as the environment for your games. You can create a huge shape, such as a sphere or rectangle, and then have your game take place inside that sphere. You can then apply a texture to that shape and turn the texture inside out using the FlipMesh command so that you can see the texture when you are inside that shape. Does that sound confusing? The best way to clarify things is to take it piece by piece and learn by doing, as in the following sections.