CST 325 - Module 4

 Week 4,

This was a packed week. Mostly involving the graphics pipeline. In short, there are multiple stages to drawing an image on the screen. The output of one stage is the input of the next stage. This involves both the CPU and GPU. The application loads and figures out what to do and how to draw it, then the GPU, which is made for this purpose, applies the expensive calculations and draws the pixels and interpolates. For this to be possible we combine multiple matrices (object, world, view, etc.) into one matrix for the screen space.

Some key concepts explored are clipping, where if parts or all of an object are outside the view volume are ignored. Culling, where we ignore rendering parts of an object not visible to the camera (a good example being getting too close to an object and seeing through it).

Rasterization is where the vectors and objects get translated to pixels, where we can also use the z buffer to record depth and specifically draw the pixel of the object closest to us.

Finally, shaders where we actually decide how we want to draw pixels. In our case, we use the vertex shader to decide the color of the pixels, then the fragment shader interpolates the colors between the pixel to fill in the shape.

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