Polygonal Mesh Rendering
The Polygonal Mesh Rendering or Polygonal Rendering is a viewing technique that allows for rendering 2D views of 3D models made by polygons.
The Polygonal Mesh Rendering exploits the geometrical characteristics of Polygons of being flat and identifiable from 3 vertices (顶点) and 1 normal vector (法向量) only.
The Polygonal Mesh Rendering is alternative to Ray-Tracing.
Advantages:
fast and allowing for hardware acceleration.
Disadvantages:
less realism (lack of shadows, reflections and refractions)
The curve surfaces are approximated because they need many polygons to describe.
Main Steps of Polygonal Rendering (The Graphic Pipeline)
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Projective Transformation (投影变换)
Establish the type of Projection: Perspective Projections and Parallel Projections. -
Culling (剔除视锥外的objects)
Identify the objects that are in the viewing frustum and therefore the only objects that will be rendered. -
Scan Conversion (Projection & Display)
The Scan Conversion maps polygon vertices to pixels with pixel depth and pixel colour. (Depth Buffer & Colour Buffer)The depth of each polygon vertex is stored in the depth buffer. The colour buffer stores the colour of each pixel in the resulting 2D view.
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Visible Surface Detection (Z-Buffer)
Solve visibility issues through the use of Z-Buffer algorithm.
1. Store a depth (Z) value for each pixel
2. Store with Z set to a high (farthest distance from eye) value for each pixel
3. As each polygon is rendered, update each pixel value and Z value if the new Z value is smaller (closer) than the old one.
The first two steps deal with geometry of the projected objects.
The last two steps deal with shading of the projected objects.
Z-Buffer algorithm
Advantage:
It correctly estimates visibility regardless of the order the polygons are considered.
Disadvantage:
It needs to take into account all polygons, including those that may be entirely or partially hidden.