Rendering

ATI GPUs
GPU in Fujitsu-Siemens stationary computer in group room: ASUS A9559 According to InfiniNET, this graphics card has a ATi Radeon 9550 SE VPU (visual processing unit)

Geometric Transformations

 * Local coordinate space: object vertices are defined in respect to a local center
 * Modeling transformation: transforms local coordinates to world coordinates
 * World coordinate space: vertices are defined in respect to a global center
 * View volume: defines viewable space, inside a frustum from the near clipping plane and the far clipping plane
 * View transformation: transforms world coordinates to view coordinates
 * View coordinate space: vertices are defined in respect to the camera
 * Screen transformation: apply perspective projection, i.e. created a fucked up 3D world
 * 3D screen space: A fucked up 3D world that only looks crazy unless viewed from the camera and ignoring the z-coordinate
 * Display transformation:
 * Display space: coordinates on 2D screen

Rendering
FIXME
 * Backface culling: In view space, backface culling is used to eliminate faces facing away from the camera by calculating a face normal and comparing it to the line of sight vector (dot product)
 * Hidden surface removal: Implemented via the Z-buffer

3D Graphics

 * Multiresolution model. A model that represents an object using different levels of detail (LODs)
 * A voxel (volumetric pixel) is a volume element, representing a value on a regular grid in three dimensional space.
 * A texel is a pixel on a texture

High Dynamic Range Rendering (HDRR)


HDRR algorithm:


 * 1) Render the scene with HDR values into a floating point buffer.
 * 2) Downsample this buffer to 1/4th size (1/2 width and 1/2 height) and suppress LDR values.
 * 3) Run a bloom filter over the downsampled image blurring it along x and y axes.
 * 4) Tone map the blurred image after compositing it with the original image.


 * HDR values means values where the maximum for a colour component (R,G,B) is above 1.0
 * Downsample means scale without interpolation
 * A bloom filter consists of
 * enhancing contrast
 * (Gaussian) blur
 * Tone mapping is reducing HDR values to values displayable by graphics hardware, e.g. L = Y / (Y + 1). This function will map scene radiance values Y in the domain $$[0,\infty)$$ to a displayable output range of [0,1).

- see also Graphics Term Overview on schmid.wiki

Image-Based Modeling And Rendering (IBMR)
Image-Based Modeling and Rendering (IBMR) methods rely on a set of images (Image-Based) of a scene to generate a three-dimensional model of this scene. For instance, simplifying a high-poly tree into a set of billboards and rendering this simplified model this rendering process is referred to as image-based rendering.