Rendering or image synthesis is the process of generating a photorealistic or non-photorealistic image from a 2D or 3D model by means of a computer program. The resulting image is referred to as a rendering. Multiple models can be defined in a scene file containing objects in a strictly defined language or data structure. The scene file contains geometry, viewpoint, textures, lighting, and shading information describing the virtual scene. The data contained in the scene file is then passed to a rendering program to be processed and output to a digital image or raster graphics image file. The term "rendering" is analogous to the concept of an artist's impression of a scene. The term "rendering" is also used to describe the process of calculating effects in a video editing program to produce the final video output.
A point cloud is a discrete set of data points in space. The points may represent a 3D shape or object. Each point position has its set of Cartesian coordinates. Points may contain data other than position such as RGB colors, normals, timestamps and others. Point clouds are generally produced by 3D scanners or by photogrammetry software, which measure many points on the external surfaces of objects around them. As the output of 3D scanning processes, point clouds are used for many purposes, including to create 3D computer-aided design (CAD) or geographic information systems (GIS) models for manufactured parts, for metrology and quality inspection, and for a multitude of visualizing, animating, rendering, and mass customization applications.
The Cornell box is a test aimed at determining the accuracy of rendering software by comparing the rendered scene with an actual photograph of the same scene, and has become a commonly used 3D test model. It was created by Cindy M. Goral, Kenneth E. Torrance, Donald P. Greenberg, and Bennett Battaile at the Cornell University Program of Computer Graphics for their paper Modeling the Interaction of Light Between Diffuse Surfaces published and presented at SIGGRAPH'84.
In scientific visualization and computer graphics, volume rendering is a set of techniques used to display a 2D projection of a 3D discretely sampled data set, typically a 3D scalar field.
An isosurface is a three-dimensional analog of an isoline. It is a surface that represents points of a constant value within a volume of space; in other words, it is a level set of a continuous function whose domain is 3-space.
Greg Turk is an American-born researcher in the field of computer graphics and a professor at the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His paper "Zippered polygon meshes from range images", concerning the reconstruction of surfaces from point data, brought the "Stanford bunny", a frequently used example object in computer graphics research, into the CGI lexicon. Turk actually purchased the original Stanford Bunny and performed the initial scans on it. He is also known for his work on simplification of surfaces, and on reaction–diffusion-based texture synthesis. In 2008, Turk was the technical papers chair of SIGGRAPH 2008. In 2012, Greg Turk was awarded the ACM Computer Graphics Achievement Award 2012.
In computer graphics, level of detail (LOD) refers to the complexity of a 3D model representation. LOD can be decreased as the model moves away from the viewer or according to other metrics such as object importance, viewpoint-relative speed or position. LOD techniques increase the efficiency of rendering by decreasing the workload on graphics pipeline stages, usually vertex transformations. The reduced visual quality of the model is often unnoticed because of the small effect on object appearance when distant or moving fast.
Non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) is an area of computer graphics that focuses on enabling a wide variety of expressive styles for digital art, in contrast to traditional computer graphics, which focuses on photorealism. NPR is inspired by other artistic modes such as painting, drawing, technical illustration, and animated cartoons. NPR has appeared in movies and video games in the form of cel-shaded animation as well as in scientific visualization, architectural illustration and experimental animation.
Marching cubes is a computer graphics algorithm, published in the 1987 SIGGRAPH proceedings by Lorensen and Cline, for extracting a polygonal mesh of an isosurface from a three-dimensional discrete scalar field. The applications of this algorithm are mainly concerned with medical visualizations such as CT and MRI scan data images, and special effects or 3-D modelling with what is usually called metaballs or other metasurfaces. The marching cubes algorithm is meant to be used for 3-D; the 2-D version of this algorithm is called the marching squares algorithm.
3D scanning is the process of analyzing a real-world object or environment to collect three dimensional data of its shape and possibly its appearance. The collected data can then be used to construct digital 3D models.
The definition of the BSDF is not well standardized. The term was probably introduced in 1980 by Bartell, Dereniak, and Wolfe. Most often it is used to name the general mathematical function which describes the way in which the light is scattered by a surface. However, in practice, this phenomenon is usually split into the reflected and transmitted components, which are then treated separately as BRDF and BTDF.
Marc Levoy is a computer graphics researcher and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, a vice president and Fellow at Adobe Inc., and a Distinguished Engineer at Google. He is noted for pioneering work in volume rendering, light fields, and computational photography.
Patrick M. Hanrahan is an American computer graphics researcher, the Canon USA Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering in the Computer Graphics Laboratory at Stanford University. His research focuses on rendering algorithms, graphics processing units, as well as scientific illustration and visualization. He has received numerous awards, including the 2019 Turing Award.
Computer graphics lighting is the collection of techniques used to simulate light in computer graphics scenes. While lighting techniques offer flexibility in the level of detail and functionality available, they also operate at different levels of computational demand and complexity. Graphics artists can choose from a variety of light sources, models, shading techniques, and effects to suit the needs of each application.
PLY is a computer file format known as the Polygon File Format or the Stanford Triangle Format. It was principally designed to store three-dimensional data from 3D scanners. The data storage format supports a relatively simple description of a single object as a list of nominally flat polygons. A variety of properties can be stored, including color and transparency, surface normals, texture coordinates and data confidence values. The format permits one to have different properties for the front and back of a polygon.
The Stanford dragon is a computer graphics 3D test model created with a Cyberware 3030 Model Shop (MS) Color 3D Scanner at Stanford University. The data for the model was produced in 1996.
Computer graphics is a sub-field of computer science which studies methods for digitally synthesizing and manipulating visual content. Although the term often refers to the study of three-dimensional computer graphics, it also encompasses two-dimensional graphics and image processing.
In 3D computer graphics, 3D modeling is the process of developing a mathematical coordinate-based representation of a surface of an object in three dimensions via specialized software by manipulating edges, vertices, and polygons in a simulated 3D space.
This is a glossary of terms relating to computer graphics.
