3D: The Basics - Displaying 3D Polygon Animations

                         Displaying 3D Polygon Animations

API

An application-programming interface (API) is a set of programming instructions and standards for accessing a Web-based software application or Web tool. A software company releases its API to the public so that other software developers can design products that are powered by its service.

An API is a software-to-software interface, not a user interface. With APIs, applications talk to each other without any user knowledge or intervention. When you buy movie tickets online and enter your credit card information, the movie ticket Web site uses an API to send your credit card information to a remote application that verifies whether your information is correct. Once payment is confirmed, the remote application sends a response back to the movie ticket Web site saying it's OK to issue the tickets.

Direct 3D

Microsoft Direct3D is a low-level graphics application programming interface (API) that enables you to manipulate visual models of 3-dimensional objects and take advantage of hardware acceleration, such as video graphics cards.

OpenGL

Originally developed by Silicon Graphics in the early '90s, OpenGL® has become the most widely-used open graphics standard in the world.. NVIDIA supports OpenGL and a complete set of OpenGL extensions, designed to give you maximum performance on our GPUs.

Graphics Pipeline

In 3D graphics rendering, the stages required to transform a three-dimensional image into a two-dimensional screen. The stages are responsible for processing information initially provided just as properties at the end points (vertices) or control points of the geometric primitives used to describe what is to be rendered. The typical primitives in 3D graphics are lines and triangles. The type of properties provided per vertex include x-y-z coordinates, RGB values, translucency, texture, reflectivity and other characteristics.

Per-vertex lighting and shading

The basic process is similar to dynamic environment mapping or cube mapping. Our proposed method is superior to those in that the accurate ray direction is reflected in the resulted image at every vertex on the mesh. Existing real-time techniques suffer from the differences between the viewpoint for the environment map and each reflection point. The proposed method minimizes this by finding an optimal viewpoint for the reflective or refractive mesh. With a sufficient number of vertices and map image resolutions, the users can render reflected images as accurate as ray tracing for all practical purposes, except for reflected objects around ray converging points of reflection on concave surfaces or refraction through convex lenses.

Clipping

Any procedure which identifies that portion of a picture which is either inside or outside a region is referred to as a clipping algorithm or clipping. The region against which an object is to be clipped is called clipping window.

Projection Transformation

Projections transform three dimensional eye coordinates into points in three dimensional clip coordinates. Three dimensional object coordinates are projected onto the projection plane Which Determines how objects are projected onto the screen. The projection matrix also defines the viewing volume, the viewing volume determines which objects or parts of objects are projected onto the screen. The viewing volume is an six-sided enclosure defined by clipping planes, Primitives outside the viewing volume are not displayed.

Viewport Transformation

Conceptually, a viewport is a 2-D rectangle into which a three-dimensional scene is projected. In Microsoft® Direct3D® Mobile, the rectangle exists as coordinates within a Direct3D Mobile surface that the system uses as a rendering target. The projection transformation converts vertices into the coordinate system used for the viewport.

Rasterisation

To prepare a page for display or printing. Rasterisation is performed by a raster image processor (RIP), which turns text and images into the matrix of pixels (bitmap) that will be displayed on screen or printed on the page. Various conversions may take place. For example, the mathematical coordinates of vector and outline fonts as well as vector drawings must be converted into bitmaps. Existing bitmaps may have to be scaled into different-sized bitmaps.

Fragment Shading

A Fragment Shader is a user-supplied program that, when executed, will process a Fragment from the rasterization process into a set of colors and a single depth value.

The fragment shader is the OpenGL pipeline stage after a primitive is rasterized. For each sample of the pixels covered by a primitive, a "fragment" is generated. Each fragment has a Window Space position, a few other values, and it contains all of the interpolated per-vertex output values from the last Vertex Processing stage.

Display

When the complete pixels have been coloured they are then able to be shown on an electronic device or computer monitor.

Bibliography

API - http://money.howstuffworks.com/business-communications/how-to-leverage-an-api-for-conferencing1.htm

Direct 3D - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb153256(v=vs.85).aspx

OpenGL - https://developer.nvidia.com/opengl

Graphics Pipeline - http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/43933/graphics-pipeline

Per-vertex lighting and shading -  http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.145.2636

Clipping - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipping_(computer_graphics)

Projection Transformation - http://www.movesinstitute.org/~mcdowell/mv4202/notes/lect7.pdf

Viewport Transformation - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa915188.aspx

Rasterisation - http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/50198/rasterize

Fragment Shading - http://www.opengl.org/wiki/Fragment_Shader