#9 Scan Conversion amp; Midterm Review.ppt

#9: Scan Conversion  Midterm Review CSE167: Computer Graphics Instructor: Ronen Barzel UCSD, Winter 2006 Outline for Today Rendering intro Culling clipping Scan conversion Midterm review Rendering Fancier term: Image Synthesis Synthesis of a 2D image from a 3D scene description Result is a 2D array of pixels Red, Green, Blue values (range 0-255 or 0.0-1.0) Can also have: opacity (“alpha”), depth (“Z”), … Rasterization = determining which pixels are drawn by a given object Hardware vs. Software Rendering Highest quality rendering is done by software Algorithms such as “ray tracing”, “photon maps”, etc… Fanciest lighting, shadowing, surface shading, smoke fog, etc. Can take minutes or hours to compute an image RenderMan (Pixar), Dali (Henrik Wann Jensen), RADIANCE, POVRay, … Modern computers often have special-purpose 3D rendering hardware. “GPU” == Graphics Processing Unit. (Nvidia, ATI) Hardware implements the traditional 3D graphics rendering pipeline Very fast, but relatively simple algorithm: Limits ability to get subtle shadows, reflections, etc. Limits on complexity of surface shading description, etc. Continually improving, driven by games industry. (Modern graphics hardware is programmable, blurring the distinction between hardware software rendering.) We will start with algorithms that are used by GPUs, but we’ll do them in software. 3-D Graphics Rendering Pipeline Rendering Triangle Sets Will focus on triangles for now Most basic and useful Algorithms also for lines, points, polygons, circles, ellipses, … Assume we have colors I.e., colors assigned per-vertex Next week we’ll look at lighting We’ve already done culling Assume we’ve already culled to the view volume: We’ve tossed out objects that we know are outside the view Does that mean everything that remains will be drawn…? More culling, and clipping The view volume culling may have been coarse ? per-triangle view volume culling Some triangles may intersect the edge of the view vol