Jeffrey R Potter

US Patent:

60725052, Jun 6, 2000

Filed:

Apr 1, 1998

Appl. No.:

9/053589

Inventors:

Thomas A. Piazza - Granite Bay CA
R. Scott Hartog - Orlando FL
Michael Mantor - Orlando FL
Jeffrey D. Potter - Winter Springs FL
Ralph Clayton Taylor - Deland FL
Michael A. Mang - Oviedo FL

Assignee:

Real 3D, Inc. - Orlando FL

International Classification:

G06T 100
G06F 1500

US Classification:

345501

Abstract:

A rasterizer comprised of a bounding box calculator, a plane converter, a windower, and incrementers. For each polygon to be processed, a bounding box calculation is performed which determines the display screen area, in spans, that totally encloses the polygon and passes the data to the plane converter. The plane converter also receives as input attribute values for each vertex of the polygon. The plane converter computes planar coefficients for each attribute of the polygon, for each of the edges of the polygon. The plane converter unit computes the start pixel center location at a start span and a starting coefficient value at that pixel center. The computed coefficients also include the rate of change or gradient, for each polygon attribute in the x and y directions, respectively. The plane converter also computes line coefficients for each of the edges of the polygon. Line equation values are passed through to the windower where further calculations allow the windower to determine which spans are either covered or intersected by the polygon.