CS 460 Computer Graphics

Primitives

Graphics primitives are objects that can be handled through hardware as building blocks for all other graphics objects. Geometric primitives include straight lines, curved lines, quadratics, cubics, and polygons. Problems relating to properly generating these objects were explored, including the jaggies, imbalanced intensities, and pixel illumination. Anti-aliasing is used to create smooth edges by varying the intensity of colors, and can be done at great computation (and monetary) expense, since this involves floating point calculations for every pixel.

DDA Algorithm

It was also shown how to reduce pixel selection into integer operations.

Polygons are 2D objects that enclosed an area. They are used to approximate surfaces as infinitesimal surface segments. This has the advantage of being easier to compute shadowing for each since the normal is a characteristic of a plane, although there are usually millions of surfaces required for most surfaces.

We need to understand was how to construct Edge Tables and Active Edge Tables which are used in the scan conversion process for polygons. The last primitive to be examined is the character primitive. Today's characters are little bitmaps and scalable fonts are usually created using polygons.

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