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How do we render surfaces

Ray tracing

ray tracing

  • - Throw rays from light-sources/camera

  • - Intersect rays with 3D shapes

  • - Pixel-wise computation

  • + Photo-realistic rendering

  • (Soft shadows, reflection, caustics)

  • + Handle general surface

  • - High computational cost

⇒ Restricted to offline rendering (but developing more and more)

Projection/Rasterization

raster

  • Assume shape made of triangles

  • 1. Project each triangle onto camera screen space

  • 2. Rasterize projected triangle into pixels

  • Triangle-wise computation

  • + Efficiently implemented on GPU

  • - Limited to triangles

  • - No native effects (shadows, transparency, etc)

⇒ The standard real time rendering with GPU