Dots and lines! Whoop Whoop!

FDF (short for Fil De Fer, French for "wireframe") is a graphical C project focused on rendering 3D landscapes using a 2D projection. This program takes a map of 3D points (from a .fdf file) and draws the corresponding wireframe model using the MLX42 graphics library.

The key goals of the project were:

• Read a 2D grid of elevation points from a file.
• Project 3D coordinates onto a 2D isometric plane.
• Draw the result as a wireframe model in a smooth, interactive window.

This project was my first encounter with graphical rendering in C, and a stepping stone to understanding how 3D scenes are drawn on a 2D screen.

🧠 What I Learned

Working on FDF taught me a wide range of low-level and graphics-focused skills:

📐 Isometric Projection

• I learned how to map 3D (x, y, z) coordinates into 2D screen space using isometric projection formulas.
• This involved understanding linear transformations, scaling, and centering the scene dynamically.

🎨 MLX42

• This was my introduction to MLX42, a lightweight X11-based graphics library.
• I handled pixel manipulation, window management, and event handling (keyboard, window close button, etc.).

🔄 Matrix Parsing

• Reading .fdf files involved dynamic memory allocation and custom parsing.
• I reused utilities like get_next_line() and ft_split() from libft for efficient file handling.

📉 Rendering Efficiency

• I implemented Bresenham’s line algorithm to draw lines between each point without performance-heavy floating-point operations.

🧼 Resource Management

• I paid special attention to freeing all heap-allocated memory and handling exits cleanly upon ESC key or window close events.

✨ Bonus Features (Optional)

I also explored additional functionality:

• Zooming in and out
• Model translation and rotation
• Parallel projection toggle
• Perspective projection
• Matrix transformations for dynamic scene manipulation

These additions taught me about real-time input handling and matrix transformations in 2D graphics pipelines.

🖼️ Example File Format

A .fdf map file contains space-separated integers representing altitudes. Here's an example:

0 0 0 0
0 5 5 0
0 5 5 0
0 0 0 0

Each value corresponds to a 3D point in (x, y, z) space, where z is the altitude. These points are connected into a grid of lines to form the wireframe model.

View the project on GitHub