Graphics clipping, why not clip pixels - graphics

I have a question about graphics clipping.
The question is: why do we need line clipping or polygon clipping?
Can we just rasterize everything then clip the pixels out of the
clipping window?
Thanks

You could do that, but as people in the comments have said, it is slower.

You can clip the far, left/right and top/bottom planes in screen space.
The problem is if a 3D object is partially behind the camera. You cannot "rasterize everything" behind a camera because typical 3D projection equations that divide by z do not make sense behind the camera - your points/vertices will be inverted/upside-down. If you have color/texture mapping it'll look weird. So at the very least your program will have to clip by the near plane and interpolate all color/texture data to the newly clipped points.
An exception is if you're doing raytracing/raycasting - rays do not go behind the camera so it works.

Related

Reconstruction 3d for a rotation camera

I have rotating camera images and I'm trying this example of a MATLAB computer vision toolbox (https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/67383-stereo-triangulation)
I have the calibration and rotation matrix for each image, however I always find 3d points equal to (0,0,0).
It is noted that the translation is null which makes the fourth column null.
You cannot reconstruct a 3D point from a rotating camera.
I suggest you try and draw an example. The idea of triangulation is to compute the intersection of two backprojection rays. These rays pass through the camera center and the point to be reconstructed. In your drawing, you'll find that the intersection becomes more and more accurate the larger the so-called stereo baseline is (that's the translation from one camera center to the other).
Now, for a rotating camera, the camera center remains the same and therefore, the two rays are identical. An intersection is not defined.

Algorithm to calculate and display a ribbon on a 3D triangle mesh

I am looking for an algorithm for the following problem:
Given:
A 3D triangle mesh. The mesh represents a part of the surface of the earth.
A polyline (a connected series of line segments) whose vertices are always on an edge or on a vertex of a triangle of the mesh. The polyline represents the centerline of a road on the surface of the earth.
I need to calculate and display the road i.e. add half of the road's width on each side of the center line, calculate the resulting vertices in the corresponding triangles of the mesh, fill the area of the road and outline the sides of the road.
What is the simplest and/or most effective strategy to do this? How do I store the data of the road most efficiently?
I see 2 options here:
render thick polyline with road texture
While rendering polyline you need TBN matrix so use
polyline tangent as tangent
surface normal as normal
binormal=tangent x normal
shift actual point p position to
p0=p+d*binormal
p1=p-d*binormal
and render textured line (p0,p1). This approach is not precise match to surface mesh so you need to disable depth or use some sort of blending. Also on sharp turns it could miss some parts of a curve (in that case you can render rectangle or disc instead of line.
create the mesh by shifting polyline to sides by half road size
This produces mesh accurate road fit, but due to your limitations the shape of the road can be very distorted without mesh re-triangulation in some cases. I see it like this:
for each segment of road cast 2 lines shifted by half of road size (green,brown)
find their intersection (aqua dots) with shared edge of mesh with the current road control point (red dot)
obtain the average point (magenta dot) from the intersections and use that as road mesh vertex. In case one of the point is outside shared mesh ignore it. In case both intersections are outside shared edge find closest intersection with different edge.
As you can see this can lead to serious road thickness distortions in some cases (big differences between intersection points, or one of the intersection points is outside surface mesh edge).
If you need accurate road thickness then use the intersection of the casted lines as a road control point instead. To make it possible either use blending or disabling Depth while rendering or add this point to mesh of the surface by re-triangulating the surface mesh. Of coarse such action will also affect the road mesh and you need to iterate few times ...
Another way is use of blended texture for road (like sprites) and compute the texture coordinate for the control points. If the road is too thick then thin it by shifting the texture coordinate ... To make this work you need to select the most far intersection point instead of average ... Compute the real half size of the road and from that compute texture coordinate.
If you get rid of the limitation (for road mesh) that road vertex points are at surface mesh segments or vertexes then you can simply use the intersection of shifted lines alone. That will get rid of the thickness artifacts and simplify things a lot.

Game Programming - Billboard issue in front of 3D object

I'm starting to develop a poc with the main features of a turn-based RPG similar to Breath of Fire 4, a mixture of 3D environment with characters and items such as billboards.
I'm using an orthographic camera with an angle of 30 degrees on the X axis, I did my sprite to act as a billboard with the pivot in the center, the problem occurs when the sprite is nearing a 3D object such as a wall.
Check out the image:
I had tried the solution leaving the rotation matrix of the billboard "upright", worked well, but of course, depending on the height and angle of the camera toward the billboard it gets kinda flattened, I also changed the pivot to the bottom of the sprite but this problem appears with objects in front of the sprite too. I was thinking that the solution would be to create a fragment shader that relies on the depth texture of some previous pass, I tried to think in how to do it with shaders but I could not figure it out. Could you help me with some article or anything that puts me in the right direction? Thank you.
See what I am trying to achieve on this video.
You had got the right approach. Use the upright matrix, and scale up Z of billboards preparing flattened Z by your camera. The Z scaling should be about 1.1547. It is (1 / cos30), which makes billboards look like original size from the camera with the angle of 30 degrees. It seems a tricky way but developers of BoF4 on the video might use the same solution too.

In 3D graphics, why is antialiasing not more often achieved using textures?

Commonly, techniques such as supersampling or multisampling are used to produce high fidelity images.
I've been messing around on mobile devices with CSS3 3D lately and this trick does a fantastic job of obtaining high quality non-aliased edges on quads.
The way the trick works is that the texture for the quad gains two extra pixels in each dimension forming a transparent one-pixel-wide outline outside the border. Due to texture sampling interpolation, so long as the transformation does not put the camera too close to an edge the effect is not unlike a pre-filtered antialiased rendering approach.
What are the conceptual and technical limitations of taking this sort of approach to render a 3D model, for example?
I think I already have one point that precludes using this kind of trick in the general case. Whenever geometry is not rectangular it does nothing to reduce aliasing: The fact that the result with a transparent 1px outline border is smooth for HTML5 with CSS3 depends on those elements being rectangular so that they rasterize neatly into a pixel grid.
The trick you linked to doesn't seem to have to do with texture interpolation. The CSS added a border that is drawn as a line. The rasterizer in the browser is drawing polygons without antialiasing and is drawing lines with antialiasing.
To answer your question of why you wouldn't want to blend into transparency over a 1 pixel border is that transparency is very difficult to draw correctly and could lead to artifacts when polygons are not drawn from back to front. You either need to presort your polygons based on distance or have opaque polygons that you check occlusion of using a depth buffer and multisampling.

Terrain tile scale in case of tilted camera

I am working on 3d terrain visualization tool right now. Surface is logically covered with square tiles. This tiling could be visualized as follows:
Suppose I want to draw a picture on these tiles. The level of detail for a picture is required to be selected according to the current camera scale which is calculated for each tile individually.
In case of vertical camera (no tilt, i.e. camera looks perpendicularly on the ground) all tiles have the same scale which is camera focal length divided on camera height above the ground.
Following picture depicts the situation:
where red triangle is camera which has no tilt, BG is camera height above the ground and EG is focal length, then scale = AC/DF = BG/EG
But if camera has tilt (i.e. pitch angle isn't 0) then scale is changed from tile to tile (even from point to point).
So I wonder if there any kind method to produce reasonable scale for each tile in that case ?
There may be (there almost surely is) a more straightforward solution, but what you could do is regular world to screen coordinate conversion.
You just take the coordinates of bounding points of the tile and calculate to which pixels on the screen these will project (you of course get floating point precision). From this, I believe you can calculate the "scale" you are mentioning.
This is applicable to any point or set of points in the world space.
Here is tutorial on how to do this "by hand".
If you are rendering the tiles with OpenGL or DirectX, you can do this much easier.

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