Gouraud shading, named after Henri Gouraud, is an interpolation method used in computer graphics to produce continuous shading of surfaces represented by polygon meshes. In practice, Gouraud shading is most often used to achieve continuous lighting on triangle meshes by computing the lighting at the corners of each triangle and linearly interpolating the resulting colours for each pixel covered by the triangle. Gouraud first published the technique in 1971. However, enhanced hardware support for superior shading models has yielded Gouraud shading largely obsolete in modern rendering.
In 3D computer graphics, Phong shading, Phong interpolation, or normal-vector interpolation shading is an interpolation technique for surface shading invented by computer graphics pioneer Bui Tuong Phong. Phong shading interpolates surface normals across rasterized polygons and computes pixel colors based on the interpolated normals and a reflection model. Phong shading may also refer to the specific combination of Phong interpolation and the Phong reflection model.
Shading refers to the depiction of depth perception in 3D models or illustrations by varying the level of darkness. Shading tries to approximate local behavior of light on the object's surface and is not to be confused with techniques of adding shadows, such as shadow mapping or shadow volumes, which fall under global behavior of light.
The High-Level Shader Language or High-Level Shading Language (HLSL) is a proprietary shading language developed by Microsoft for the Direct3D 9 API to augment the shader assembly language, and went on to become the required shading language for the unified shader model of Direct3D 10 and higher.
In 3D computer graphics and solid modeling, a polygon mesh is a collection of vertices, edges and faces that defines the shape of a polyhedral object. The faces usually consist of triangles, quadrilaterals (quads), or other simple convex polygons (n-gons), since this simplifies rendering, but may also be more generally composed of concave polygons, or even polygons with holes.
In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene—a process known as shading. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of specialized functions in computer graphics special effects and video post-processing, as well as general-purpose computing on graphics processing units.
The computer graphics pipeline, also known as the rendering pipeline or graphics pipeline, is a framework within computer graphics that outlines the necessary procedures for transforming a three-dimensional (3D) scene into a two-dimensional (2D) representation on a screen. Once a 3D model is generated, whether it's for a video game or any other form of 3D computer animation, the graphics pipeline converts the model into a visually perceivable format on the computer display. Due to the dependence on specific software, hardware configurations, and desired display attributes, a universally applicable graphics pipeline does not exist. Nevertheless, graphics application programming interfaces (APIs), such as Direct3D and OpenGL, were developed to standardize common procedures and oversee the graphics pipeline of a given hardware accelerator. These APIs provide an abstraction layer over the underlying hardware, relieving programmers from the need to write code explicitly targeting various graphics hardware accelerators like AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and others.
A shading language is a graphics programming language adapted to programming shader effects. Shading languages usually consist of special data types like "vector", "matrix", "color" and "normal".
In 3D computer graphics, polygonal modeling is an approach for modeling objects by representing or approximating their surfaces using polygon meshes. Polygonal modeling is well suited to scanline rendering and is therefore the method of choice for real-time computer graphics. Alternate methods of representing 3D objects include NURBS surfaces, subdivision surfaces, and equation-based representations used in ray tracers.
In computer graphics, a triangle strip is a subset of triangles in a triangle mesh with shared vertices, and is a more memory-efficient method of storing information about the mesh. They are more efficient than un-indexed lists of triangles, but usually equally fast or slower than indexed triangle lists. The primary reason to use triangle strips is to reduce the amount of data needed to create a series of triangles. The number of vertices stored in memory is reduced from 3N to N + 2, where N is the number of triangles to be drawn. This allows for less use of disk space, as well as making them faster to load into RAM.
Multisample anti-aliasing (MSAA) is a type of spatial anti-aliasing, a technique used in computer graphics to remove jaggies.
In computer graphics, a triangle mesh is a type of polygon mesh. It comprises a set of triangles that are connected by their common edges or vertices.
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.
In the field of 3D computer graphics, the unified shader model refers to a form of shader hardware in a graphical processing unit (GPU) where all of the shader stages in the rendering pipeline have the same capabilities. They can all read textures and buffers, and they use instruction sets that are almost identical.
ARB assembly language is a low-level shading language, which can be characterized as an assembly language. It was created by the OpenGL Architecture Review Board (ARB) to standardize GPU instructions controlling the hardware graphics pipeline.
A vertex buffer object (VBO) is an OpenGL feature that provides methods for uploading vertex data to the video device for non-immediate-mode rendering. VBOs offer substantial performance gains over immediate mode rendering primarily because the data reside in video device memory rather than system memory and so it can be rendered directly by the video device. These are equivalent to vertex buffers in Direct3D.
A vertex in computer graphics is a data structure that describes certain attributes, like the position of a point in 2D or 3D space, or multiple points on a surface.
The Xbox technical specifications describe the various components of the Xbox video game console.
This is a glossary of terms relating to computer graphics.
In computational geometry, a fan triangulation is a simple way to triangulate a polygon by choosing a vertex and drawing edges to all of the other vertices of the polygon. Not every polygon can be triangulated this way, so this method is usually only used for convex polygons.
