How to make a 3D engine ? I don''t mean a hard core 3D environment type thing just something that can read data from a file an then plot it to the screen where it can be rotated thanks Please don''t give me links to tutorials and stuff, mathematicians never explained thing properly

Well, I good place to start is one of the Hosted Sites. Nehe can get you started with OpenGL and NeXe will get you started with DirectX. Using either you can get basic functionality relatively quickly. A bit more time and you can do some fairly impressive things. Once up and running doing a few basic things you may want to buy a book or two or perhaps a few dozen. I''m not sure to what degree you would need how to books on either OpenGL or DirectX if you work through the tutorials. More likely a how to on game development from the LaMothe or WordWare series would be more useful.

If you are interested in theory then there are a whole lot of books on all kinds of arcane topics. Personally the best starting point is Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice by Foley, et al. The 2nd Edition is rather dated and supposedly there is a 3rd edition though I have yet to actually see it. The 2nd edition makes a good starting point, even though dated, since it makes very few assumptions about what you already know. It also covers scan conversion methods and many topics in 2D that other books don''t address. As near as I can tell you should ignore the graphics package the book refers to. Books such as "3D Game Engine Design" and "Real-time Rendering" pretty well assume a certain level of mathematical knowledge that you may not have. "3D Computer Graphics" isn''t quite as bad, but still might be a bit much starting out. I have yet to get "3D Games: Real-time Rendering and Software Technology" by the same author so I can''t say anything about it. Those I think are pretty much the main theory of 3D books. There are a lot of other theory books on specific topics such as Nurbs, Metaballs, Volumetric Lighting and the list goes on but they won''t be of much use starting out without using a math package such as Mathmatica, MatLab, Scientific Notebook, Maple, or MathCAD to do the rendering for you. Most likely if that is the type of thing that interests you then you would be best to start with a how to book or website to get the basic rendering working quickly and then start into a book on a specific topic.