A Real Time Rendering System with Normal Vector Shading

graphics workstations have rendering performances of more than one million polygons per second in This paper presents a graphics workstation for real­ conjunction with hardware supported transparency, time display of Phong shaded polygons. The applied anti-aliasing, perspective texture mapping, image shading method is based on normal vector compositing, etc. In spite of the fact that great strides interpolation using a precalculated reflectance map. have been made to improve the realistic display ofvery Nearly 40 million pixels and more than 2 million 3­ complex objects and scenes, the shading process of all sided polygons per second can be displayed. After commercial real-time graphics workstations is based giving an overview of the system, we describe the on the Gouraud-interpolation which is only suitable to implementation details of the architecture. The normal render dull surfaces. The reason for this can be found vector-based shader unit is the focus of this in the fact that a rendering process which uses more description. In addition, we present a new method for efficient shading methods, for example Phong:.shading, the reduction of Z-buffer initialization time by means needs approximately 10 times more computation time of an additional frame counter. Finally, we summarize per pixel than for simple Goraud-shading. the performance data of the rendering system and give In order to render objects with shiny surfaces by means an outlook of our future activities in this field. of a Gouraud-interpolation hardware, so-called dirty Phong shading is often used. For this shading method