zrendv10announce

[Game.Programming].Academic - Graphics Gems (6 books source code)

This document describes the Z bufffer based rendering program
developed at the West Virginia University.  The key features of this
program are:

(a) Reads a variant of the standard Neutral File Format (NFF) as input
(b) Outputs a 24 bit color TARGA file
(c) Uses accurate fixpoint arithmetic in all its calculations
(d) Works on X windows environment.  We have tested it on Sun Sparc machines.
(e) High Performance.  The renderer has almost realtime performance.

This software is available through the Web and via anonymous ftp.  The
software includes sample files, including the teapot.  We would
appreciate any feedback you can give us on this software.  We are
quite impressed by the quality of the images produced.  Enjoy the use
of this utility!

Raghu Karinthi
Department of Statistics and Computer Science
Concurrent Engineering Research Center
West Virginia University
Morgantown, WV 26506-6506
Voice: [phone]
Fax:   [phone]
Email: [e-mail] OR [e-mail]

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This describes briefly our implementation of the Z buffer rendering
algorithm.  The rendering pipeline has the following steps:

1. Reading the input file.
2. Backface Culling
3. Trivial Accept/Reject of Triangles
4. Computing the light intensity at the vertices.  Later, Gouraud
   shading is used for interpolating the light intensity.
   Several diffuse light sources and one specular light source are supported
   but only Gouraud shading is supported.
5. Applying the view transformation to all the vertices
6. Clipping
7. Division by W, Map to 3DViewport
8. Rasterization, and writing to framebuffer.
9. Writing framebuffer to a TARGA file.

Subsequently, one can display the TARGA file, by invoking a separate
utility (included with this package).

We compute 24 bit color (R,G,B) at each pixel and write it to a TARGA
file.  The functions to do write in TARGA file format are from the
"LUG" library due to Raul Rivero.  The program "sx11" to display a
TARGA file is also from the same library.  We have extracted these two
utilities from the LUG library and provided them in the subdirectories
"tga" and "sx11".

Input File Format:  The input is a modified NFF file format described
in the file called NFF.

URL
http://www.cerc.wvu.edu/public_domain_sw.html

FTP INSTRUCTIONS 

ftp ftp.cerc.wvu.edu

Enter name: anonymous
Enter Password: type in your email address

cd pub/sources
binary
get ZRendv10.tar.Z
quit

Then, uncompress and untar the files.  Example (not guaranteed!):

uncompress < ZRendv10.tar.Z | tar xf -

Installation: type INSTALL in the main directory.

Usage: ZRendv10 <backface cull> <trivial accept/reject> <clip> <phong>
<NFFfilename> <TARGAfilename>.
<backface cull>  must be -bf to enable backface culling, anything else to
disable it.
<trivial accept/reject> must be -tr to enable trivial accept/reject of
triangles, anything else to disable it.
<clip> must be -clip to enable triangle clipping, anything else to disable it.
<phong> must be -phong to enable the use of the Phong model (the data file must
have a Phong source) and anything else to use the diffuse model.
<NFFFilename> is input NFF file name.
<TARGAfilename> is output TARGA file name.

Example:
ZRendv10 -bf -tr -clip -phong tpot1l.nff tpot1l.tga

The display program is "sx11" in the "sx11" subdirectory.  It is invoked by
typing: sx11 <TARGAfilename>.  The <TARGAfilename> must have a ".tga"
suffix.

Example:
sx11 tpot1l.tga