Patent
1994-04-01
1996-09-03
Herndon, Heather R.
395130, G09B 908
Patent
active
055532080
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
TECHNICAL FIELD
The present invention relates to an image synthesizing system and particularly to such a system which can perform the synthesization on off high-quality image in real time.
BACKGROUND TECHNIQUES
There are known various image synthesizing systems used as in three-dimensional (3-D) games, airplane or other vehicle simulators and so on. Typically, such image synthesizing systems have information of image relating to a 3-D object 300 as shown in FIG. 24, which has previously been stored therein. Information of image is perspectively transformed into a pseudo 3-D image 308 on a screen 306. As a player 302 makes an operation with a control panel 304 such as rotation, translation or the like, the system responds to the control signal to perform the processing with respect to rotation, translation or the like of the image of the 3-D object 300 in real time. Thereafter, the processed 3-D image is perspectively transformed into the pseudo 3-D image on the screen 306. As a result, the player 302 itself can rotate or translate the three-dimensional objects in real time to experience a virtual 3-D space.
FIG. 25 shows one of such image synthesizing systems. The image synthesizing system will be described as being applied to a 3-D game.
As shown in FIG. 25, the image synthesizing system comprises an operator's control unit 510, a game space processing unit 500, an image synthesizing unit 512 and a CRT 518.
The game space processing unit 500 sets a game space in response to control signals from the operator's control unit 510 and in accordance with a game program which has been stored in a central processing unit 506. Namely, the processing is performed with respect to what position and direct/on the 3-D object 300 should be arranged in.
The image synthesizing unit 512 comprises an image supply unit 514 and an image forming unit 516. The image synthesizing unit 512 performs the synthesization of a pseudo 3-D image in accordance with information of a game space set by the game space processing unit 500.
In this image synthesizing system, 3-D objects in the game space are defined as polyhedrons which are divided into 3-D polygons. As shown in FIG. 24, For example, the 3-D object 300 is represented as a polyhedron which is divided into 3-D polygons 1-6 (polygons 4-6 not shown herein). The coordinates and associated data of each vertex in each of the 3-D polygons (which will be referred to "image data of vertices") have been stored in a 3-D image data storage 552.
The image supply unit 514 performs various mathematical treatments such as rotation, translation and others, and various coordinate conversions such as perspective transformation and others, for the image data of vertices, in accordance with the setting of the game space processing unit 500. After the image data of vertices has been processed, it is permuted in a given order before outputted to the image forming unit 516.
The image forming unit 516 comprises a polygon generator 570 and a palette circuit 580. The polygon generator 570 comprises an outline (polygon edges) point processing unit 324 and a line processor 326. The image forming unit 516 is adapted to perform a process of painting all the dots (pixels) in the polygon with a predetermined color data or the like in the following procedure:
First of all, the outline point processing unit 324 calculates left-hand and right-hand outline points which are intersection points between polygon edges AB, BC, CD, DA and other polygon edges and scan lines, as shown in FIG. 26. Subsequently, the line processor 326 paints, with specified color data, sections between the left-hand and right-hand outline points, for example, sections between L and Q; Q and R as shown in FIG. 26. In FIG. 26, the section between L and Q is painted by red color data while the section between Q and R is painted by blue color data. Thereafter, the color data used on painting are transformed into RGB data in the palette circuit 580, and then the RGB data in turn is outputted to and displayed in CRT 518.
In such an image synt
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Murata Hiroyuki
Yokota Takashi
Herndon Heather R.
Namco Ltd.
Vo Cliff N.
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