Chapter 5

Turning Vertices into Pixels

In the previous chapters we learned the basic algorithms for turning a specification of a three-dimensional scene (vertices, polygons, etc.) into a picture on the screen. In the following sections we show the details of how a geometric primitive becomes a region of colored pixels and also several optimizations that are commonly used for making it an efficient operation.

5.1 Rasterization

Rasterization comes into play after the vertex positions are expressed in viewport space (see Section 4.6.4). Unlike all the previous reference systems (in order: object space, world space, view space, NDC) this one is discrete and we have to decide how many fragments belong to the primitive and which discrete coordinates ...

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