Method and apparatus for determining visible surfaces

Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system – Computer graphics processing – Three-dimension

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G06T 1540

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active

058253637

ABSTRACT:
A system for rendering a three-dimensional scene by determining each visible surface of geometric shapes for a sequence of frames. For a selected frame, a working frame buffer is initialized by copying background data maintained in a background frame buffer to the working frame buffer. A working Z buffer is initialized by copying background depth data of the background Z buffer to the working Z buffer. The background data is represented by a bitmap defining values for pixels of a background remaining constant for the frame sequence. The background depth data is represented by depth values defining distances between a view point reference and the geometric shapes at the pixels of the selected frame. For a selected geometric shape, a pixel is selected from a set of pixels for the frame. This set of pixels is defined by an intersection between the view point reference and the selected geometric shape. A determination is then made whether the selected geometric shape obscures another geometric shape at the selected pixel. If so, a value of the selected pixel is obtained and stored within the working frame buffer. In addition, a depth value defined by a distance between the view point reference and the selected geometric shape is stored within the working Z buffer. These steps are completed for each remaining pixel within the set of pixels and, in turn, this process is completed for each remaining geometric shape.

REFERENCES:
patent: 4992780 (1991-02-01), Penna et al.
patent: 5295234 (1994-03-01), Ishida et al.
Regan et al., "Priority Rendering with a Virtual Reality Address Recalculation Pipeline", Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, pp. 166-162, 1994.
James D. Foley, et al., Computer Graphics, 1990, section 15.4, "The Z-Buffer Algorithm", pp. 668-672.

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