In the third part of our in-depth look at 3D game rendering, we will focus on what will happen to the 3D world after vertex processing and the scene gets sharper. Router
Creating a texture is one of the most important steps in rendering, although all it does is calculate and change the color of a two-dimensional grid of color blocks.
Most of the visual effects seen in games today are based on smart use of textures - without them the game would be boring and lifeless. Let's take a look at how it all works!
As always, if you're not ready to dig into the texture, don't panic - you can start our 3D game with a 101's rendering, but once you've gone through the basics, our next look Be sure to read for In the world of 3D graphics
Easy start
The best-selling 3D games of the last 12 months were chosen and they will all share one thing: using texture maps. (Or just texture)
This is a very common term that most people think of in the same way when thinking about a surface: a simple, flat square, or a rectangle with a textured image. (Grass, stone, metal, cloth, face etc.)
But when multiple layers are woven together using complex arithmetic, remarkably realistic images can be produced using these original images in a 3D scene.
To see how this is possible, start by crossing them together and see what objects in the 3D world would look like without them.
As we saw in the previous article, in a 3D world there are corners - simple shapes that move and then become colored.
These are used in the original builds, which are then squeezed into a 2D pixel grid. Because we will not use textures, we have to paint them.
One method that can be used, known as flat shedding, is to apply the color of the original first vertex and then use the color that is covered by the shape in the raster.
Obviously, this is not a realistic teapot, no less, because the color of the texture is completely wrong. The color jumps from one level to another without a smooth transition. One solution to this problem is to use something called gourd shedding.
It is a process that takes the color of the vertical and calculates how the color will change on the surface of the triangle.
The math is called linear interpolation, which seems odd, but actually means that if one side of the origin is 0.2 red and the other 0.8 red, the center of the shape will be a straight color. Between 0.2 and 0.8 (eg 0.5).
This is very easy to do, and this is its main advantage, as is the speed of early 3D games. Many games use this technique because the computational hardware is limited in what it can do.
But even this is a problem because if the light is pointed to the right in the center of the triangle, its angle (vertex) cannot be captured correctly. This means that the highlights created by the light can be completely missed.
Although flat and gourd shedding has its place in the arsenal, the example above is an obvious choice for using textures for improvement.
And to understand what happens when the surface is applied, we'll go back in time ... back in 1996.
Brief game history and GPU
Quake was released 23 years ago, a game illustrated by ID Software, although not the first to use 3D polygons and textures to create an environment. But it is also the first game to use them all efficiently.
Something else was showing what could be done with OpenGL (the graphics API was still in the first revision at the time) and it also helped sell earlier graphics cards such as Rendition Verite and 3D FX Voodoo.
All chips (TMU) are available for mixing with raster to obtain texture and pixels from other chips (FBI). It may perform some additional processes such as fog effect or transparency.
If we take a look at the architecture behind graphics card design and operation, we can see how these processes work.
The FBI chip assumes two colors and blends them together. One of them may be a surface value. The blending process is mathematically easy. But there is little difference between what is mixed and what the API uses to follow the instructions.
If we look at what Direct3D has to offer in terms of blending functions and blending functions, we can see that each pixel is first multiplied by a number between 0.0 and 1.0. This determines how much the pixel color will have an effect on its final appearance.
