Robert L. Cook, Loren Carpenter, Edwin Catmull
Abstract:
An architecture is presented for fast high-quality rendering of
complex images. All objects are reduced to common world-space geometric entities
called micropolygons, and all of the shading and visibility calculations operate
on these micropolygons. Each type of calculation is performed in a coordinate
system that is natural for that type of calculation. Micropolygons are created
and textured in the local coordinate system of the object, with the result
that texture filtering is simplified and improved. Visibility is calculated
in screen space using stochastic point sampling with a z buffer. There are
no clipping or perspective calculations. Geometric and texture locality are
exploited to minimize paging and to support models that contain arbitrarily
many primitives.
Paper (PDF)