A note on what #Rendering is in #animation: Rendering The well-developed field of Computer Graphics has produced many algorithms for rendering three-dimensional objects onto two-dimensional displays. The are many complications involved in this process, including, but not limited to, drawing polygons, filling polygons, shading, shadows, displaying patterns, changing line and pen styles, and clipping and visible-surface determination. In general, objects are represented using polygons because they are relatively simple to draw and, by using a sufficient number of polygons, most shapes can be closely approximated. Patterns are important because they can be used to greatly reduce the number of polygons necessary to adequately represent real-world objects. Since rendering time is generally proportional to the number of polygons to be drawn, reducing the number of polygons to be drawn allows increased animation quality through higher frame rates. As an example, consider drawing a brick wall; we could represent each brick as a rectangle and draw each separately. Unfortunately, there might be thousands of bricks in the wall, which would slow down the rendering process substantially. Alternately, we could represent the wall as one large rectangle and draw a brick pattern over the rectangle, which would be much faster. Clipping and visible-surface determination are among the most important stages of rendering. Clipping determines which objects in the three-dimensional world show through the viewport. Visible-surface determination is the process of determining which parts of the visible objects are visible from a particular viewpoint. Conceptually, it is not very difficult; unfortunately, unless the hardware being used has built-in support for visible-surface determination, the algorithms take a lot of computation. Common algorithms include Z-buffering, space partitioning, and ray tracing. Generally, only high-end hardware (such as Silicon Graphics workstations) has hardware support - PCs and even most workstations rely on smart algorithms. Understandably, there is a lot of active research in the area of improved visible-surface determination algorithms.
Posted on: Tue, 03 Dec 2013 07:00:01 +0000
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