The Graphics Pipeline - Making 3D into 2D
(Page 4 of 4 )
The next stage of the pipeline is the part where a heck of a lot of transistors are being dedicated these days. This is the stage where that final 3D scene we have gets changed to the 2D one that appears on your monitor.
What's so complicated about that you ask? At the start of this stage, all data is held in texels and vertices, and must be converted to the pixels that your monitor will display. Typically, there are many of these texels for each pixel you are going to be working with. This leaves selection and averaging to be done to choose values.
As well, the 3D (x, y, and z) coordinates must be changed into the 2D (x, y) that is to be projected onto your monitor. Finally, textures, shading, anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, shadows, fog, alpha blending, stencils and depth, and all the other functions that make your graphics really pop have to be done.
I could go on about rasterization and rendering for quite a while. And I plan to, in the next article in this series, dedicated wholly to this one stage of our basic graphics pipeline.
Thanks for checking this article out, and I hope you gained some insight into basic 3D graphics and how they end up on your monitor. If you have any questions, feel free to drop into our forums, or hit up the blog associated with this article.
| DISCLAIMER: The content provided in this article is not warranted or guaranteed by Developer Shed, Inc. The content provided is intended for entertainment and/or educational purposes in order to introduce to the reader key ideas, concepts, and/or product reviews. As such it is incumbent upon the reader to employ real-world tactics for security and implementation of best practices. We are not liable for any negative consequences that may result from implementing any information covered in our articles or tutorials. If this is a hardware review, it is not recommended to open and/or modify your hardware. |
