Computer graphics: introduction
By Adam Lake
Magazine: May 1997 | Volume 3, No. 4
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Ray tracing
By Paul Rademacher
A human's eye view
Frameless Rendering (FR) is a rendering paradigm which performs stochastic temporal filtering by updating pixels in a random order, based on most recent available input data, and displaying them to the screen immediately [1]. This is a departure from frame-based approaches commonly experienced in interactive graphics. A typical interactive graphics session uses a single input state to compute an entire frame. This constrains the state to be known at the time the first pixel's value is computed. Frameless Rendering samples inputs many times during the interval which begins at the start of the first pixel's computation and ends with the last pixel's computation. Thus, Frameless Rendering performs temporal supersampling - it uses more samples over time. This results in an approximation to motion blur, both theoretically and perceptually.This paper explores this motion blur and its relationship to: camera open shutter time, current computer graphics motion-blur implementations, temporally anti-aliased images, and the Human Visual System's (HVS) motion smear quality (see 'quality' footnote) [2].Finally, we integrate existing research results to conjecture how Frameless Rendering can use knowledge of the Human Visual System's blurred retinal image to direct spatiotemporal sampling. In other words, we suggest importance sampling (see 'sampling' footnote) by prioritizing pixels for computation based on their importance to the visual system in discerning what is occurring in an interactive image sequence.
By Ellen J. Scher Zagier
Levels of detail & polygonal simplification
This paper covers the techniques of Polygonal Simplification in order to produce Levels of Detail (LODs). The problem of creating LODs is a complex one: how can simpler versions of a model be created? How can the approximation error be measured? How can the visual degradation be estimated? Can all this be done automatically? After exposing the basic aims and principles of polygonal simplification, we compare recent algorithms and state their various qualities and weaknesses.
By Mike Krus, Patrick Bourdot, Françoise Guisnel, Gullaume Thibault
Faster 3D game graphics by not drawing what is not seen
The increasing demands of 3D game realism - in terms of both scene complexity and speed of animation - are placing excessive strain on the current low-level, computationally expensive graphics drawing operations. Despite these routines being highly optimized, specialized, and often being implemented in assembly language or even in hardware, the ever-increasing number of drawing requests for a single frame of animation causes even these systems to become overloaded, degrading the overall performance. To offset these demands and dramatically reduce the load on the graphics subsystem, we present a system that quickly and efficiently finds a large portion of the game world that is not visible to the viewer for each frame of animation, and simply prevents it from being sent to the graphics system. We build this searching mechanism for unseen parts from common and easily implemented graphics algorithms.
By Kenneth E. Hoff
An introduction to the GIMP
By Matt Cutts
Ask Jack: skill development
By Jack Wilson
Road crew
By John Cavazos