3D transformations on the Quartz2D path - drawing application

Question

I'm in the planning phase of a Cocoa drawing application (for Mac, not iOS), and I'm trying to figure out if one of my functions is technically possible using any of the drawing schemes. Any help or relevant information would be greatly appreciated.

The idea is to apply a 3D transform to an object drawn with Quartz2D. I considered capturing the corresponding part of the View canvas (where objects are drawn) as an image and sending it to Core Animation, but this does not seem to be the best option. Since it is a drawing application, it is less about 3D animation than about transformed form. This solution is also less ideal, as I assume that if the 2D object was a vector path, but rather a bitmap, I would have to rasterize it to apply such a transformation. An ideal implementation will allow the user to dynamically rotate a flat object in three dimensions until it finds a suitable orientation, blocks this transformation, and cannot manually adjust the path vector points.

Is it possible? Do I need to work with OpenGL directly? Help of any kind is appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

It seems to me that everything that you would do with the 3D transformation, you should be able to do with several affine transformations. See UIBezierPath's -applyTransform .