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Hidden face removal

The document discusses techniques for hidden face removal in 3D graphics, focusing on backface culling and view cone clipping to optimize rendering by eliminating unnecessary polygons. It explains how to implement these techniques using pseudo-code and emphasizes the importance of correctly defined polygon orientations. Additionally, it introduces the concept of portals to further reduce polygon calculations by managing visibility between rooms in a scene.

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Duc Le
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10 views3 pages

Hidden face removal

The document discusses techniques for hidden face removal in 3D graphics, focusing on backface culling and view cone clipping to optimize rendering by eliminating unnecessary polygons. It explains how to implement these techniques using pseudo-code and emphasizes the importance of correctly defined polygon orientations. Additionally, it introduces the concept of portals to further reduce polygon calculations by managing visibility between rooms in a scene.

Uploaded by

Duc Le
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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3DICA v2.

22b
The Ultimate 3D Coding Tutorial (C) Ica /Hubris 1996,1997,1998
Over 150k of pure sh...er, 3d coding power !

6. Hidden face removal


6.1 Backface Culling

The idea of backface culling is simple : if a polygon is a backface (it’s not


facing the camera), there’s no need to draw it. This can be checked by finding
the z value of its normal and by examining its sign. This won’t work if the faces
haven’t been defined right, so be careful (for example 3D Studio creates the
correct type of faces; the vertices are in counterclockwise order). Here’s a
pseudo-backface-culler :
function backface(x1, y1, x2, y2, x3, y3)
; find the z value of the cross product
if ( (x3-x1)*(y3-y2) - (x3-x2)*(y3-y1) > 0 )
return TRUE
else
return FALSE
endf

6.2 View Cone

View cone means the conical area that can be seen by looking at some
direction. Here’s a picture of a view cone :

(C = camera point, P = projection plane. The camera point is actually the


watcher’s eye, and the projection plane is the computer screen.) So there are five
planes against which we must clip (or six planes if we want to use a back plane
in a defined maximum range when using fog or light attenuation for example). If
a polygon is not inside the cone, we can drop it out the calculations and save a
great amount of processing time. If it’s partly inside, we clip it against the cone
and draw only the part which is inside. The more elegant (and faster) form of
view cone uses 3D clipping to clip this kind of polygons but I recommend using
graphical clipping in the polygon routine at first; it’s far more straightforward to
implement and it works, too (ok there’s a problem with the z thing).

The thing is done by comparing the 2Dx, 2Dy, and z coordinates to the
screen edges and by acting accordingly. Applying to the z coordinate, we don’t
draw the polygon if any of its vertices’ z is less than zero; we can’t draw or
interpolate right a polygon like that. If your scene bugs with this, please read the
following chapter. Pseudo :
if
(
EVERY vertex.z>0
and
SOME vertex.x at the range 0..MAX_X
and
SOME vertex.y at the range 0..MAX_Y
)
draw.

6.2.1 3D clipping

This is a bit trickier thing to implement. It’s best if you’re using n-sided
polygons; a clipped triangle might become a quadrangle, and if you were using
only triangles, you should create two triangles out of it. No good. Anyway, some
pseudo to clip the z’s (really not the one and only way to do the thing, try your
own ways !) :
; check the z's
every_z_out=true
every_z_in=true
for a=0 -> vertices_in_poly-1
if z[a]>1 ; or zero if this doesn't work with you
every_z_out=false
else
every_z_in=false
if (not every_z_out) and (not every_z_in)
clip z's
every_z_in=true
perform 2d transformations
...
if every_z_in
draw_using_graphical_clipping.

That’s the main idea. Clipping can be performed by using the parametric
equation of a line (((x0,y0,z0) = vertex 1 etc) :
x = x0 + t*(x1-x0)
y = y0 + t*(y1-y0)
z = z0 + t*(z1-z0)

Z-clip : we define z=0.5 and calculate t :


z0 + t*(z1-z0) = 0.5
t = (0.5-z0) / (z1-z0)

This is placed into the equations of x and y :


x = x0 + (x1-x0)*(0.5-z0)/(z0-z1)
y = y0 + (y1-y0)*(0.5-z0)/(z0-z1)
z=1

And these are the new coordinates of the vertex !

6.3 Portals

Portals are very simple and easy to understand and implement (at least the
most primitive versions ) Using them, we can eliminate 70-80% of polys from
our calculations and do it even before rotating anything (another story) !

Portals require the whole scene to consist of rooms. Each room has not
only its own polygons but also invisible portal polygons in the holes (doors,
windows, ...) through which one can see into another rooms. Portal polygons are
handled just like any normal polygon. The difference between normal and portal
polygons is that when a portal polygon should be drawn, we just move into the
room it’s pointing if it’s seen. We continue like this until we're satisfied with the
result. It’s worth noticing that portal polygons which are too far away needen’t
to be handled either. Another point is that polygons in the next rooms can only
be seen though the portal polygons of the preceding rooms.

There are many ways to implement portals. Some like the rooms consist
of convex polygons and all polygons to be clipped against the portal polygons
(SLOW !). There are numerous other ways, too, just find the best one for your
purposes !

An interesting thing is that we can eliminate most rooms just by backface-


culling the portal polygons; if the portal is a backface, the room it’s pointing
can’t be seen !

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