Warning: this homepage works only with netscape 2.0 or higher Gouraud shading Warning: some knowledge about vectors required Types of shading Shading is the change in saturation on a surface because of reflection. Shading depends on the properties of the surface and the angle between surface, light source and your eyes There are three types of shading which are commonly used in computer graphic programs. Flat shading This type of shading is very simple and fast. The object you are to shade is divided in a lot of flat surfaces. You take the normal on a surface (a normal is a vector perpendicular on the surface) and you compute the angle between the light source vector (the direction in which the light shines) and the normal. This angle is then translated to a shade. So every surface has one shade. For example when you have 16 shades, 0 being the dullest and 16 the brightest, you divide them between 0 and x degrees. x is an angle between 0 and 90 degrees. Why 90? Because light can't go around a corner. A smaller x means a smaller spot of light (hotspot). Phong shading Phong shading produces the best results but is real slow. What you do is, you calculate the normal on every point of the surface. Now you will ask:"How am I supposed to calculate the normal of a point?". Well, that's impossible. But you can make a plane consisting of adjacent points and take the normal of that plane. Next you shade all points the same way as with flat shading. Of course there are a lot of methods to make it faster, but I haven't looked at them yet. Gouraud shading After flat and before phong comes gouraud shading. With gouraud shading you divide the object into flat triangles. Each triangle has of course three vertices. From each vertex you take the normal. Same problem: how do you calculate the normal of a point. Not. In this case you take the average direction of the triangle normals of the triangles of which the vertex is a part. After you did that, you shade the vertices and you interpolate the shading over the triangle. The easiest and fastest way of doing this is: * Trace the edges. You know where the edges begin and end. You also know the light intensity of those points, so it's easy to calculate dY/dX and dI/dX of the edges and calculate the edge and the colors along the edge. * Trace the scanlines. By tracing the edges, you have acquired all starting points, ending points, starting intensities and ending intensities of the triangles scanlines. So all you have to do is fill up the lines between the edges. Tracing the scanlines can be a problem. When you use a floating-point divide per scanline, it'll run like a snail. To overcome this, you can use Bresenham, DDA or setup a DIV-table. * Bresenham uses no DIVs at all, but the time it takes to draw one pixel is longer than the other methods. See some code. * Digital Differential Analyser. DDA uses IDIVs, but as you might know IDIVs are much faster than DIVs or FDIVs. This technique is called fixed point. It means that you give a pre-determined amount of bits to the integer and the fraction of the number. Example: Take 10 bits and divide them between integer and fraction: 111111.1111 e.g. 0000010100 makes 1.25. Converting from floating point to fixed is just a matter of multiplying with 2number of fraction bits and casting it into an integer. But beware of the fact that you have less bits for the integer part. From fixed point to normal integer is done by adding 2(number of fraction bits)-1 and shifting the bits fraction places to the right. Code is available. * Division table. This is essentially the same as DDA, but now you don't do the division. Instead you look it up in an array. Only to be used on a processor that doesn't divide faster than it does a memory lookup. Soon: MMX Code! Download render.zip. This is a gouraud shaded and texture mapped vector engine. It was made by Peter Zijlstra (peter@mcs.nl) and me. x86, FPU and VESA 1.2 required. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Go back to my homepage. This page was made by Marijn Meijles