Home | Lehre | Videos | Texte | Vorträge | Software | Person | Impressum, Datenschutzerklärung |
Wang Tiles in Cinema 4D
Real-time
OpenGL (platform-neutral, design by committee), jogl (Java wrapper for OpenGL)
DirectX Graphics (Windows-based), Managed DirectX (old .NET wrapper for DirectX), XNA (new .NET wrapper for DirectX)
OpenGL ES, a cleaned-up version of OpenGL for embedded devices (PDAs, game consoles, ...)
Java3D, high-level Java API on top of OpenGL or DirectX, no longer state of the art; when manufacturers of mobile phones speak of “Java 3D”, they typically mean JSR-184, see next point
M3G, a 3D API for devices with limited computing power such as mobile phones
...
Offline
RenderMan Interface
Mental Ray Interface
...
Immediate Mode: Issue drawing commands explicitly; the graphics API does not know how to build the 3D world on its own; examples: OpenGL, DirectX.
Retained Mode: Construct and store the 3D world using the API; rendering is handled automatically; examples: Java3D, OpenInventor, OpenSceneGraph, most game engines; usually a scenegraph is created to store the 3D world as a hierarchy of objects and sub-objects.
Up to now, we used only local illumination models, which lack effects such as shadows and reflections.
For real-time applications, shadows typically are faked through shadow volumes or (which has become standard) shadow maps. Demos.
Global illumination:
Note that in commercial software these terms are used differently: Global illumination is understood to include indirect illumination; radiosity is used as a synonym for that notion of global illumination.
Interactive ray tracing is a hot research topic.
Computer graphics (real-time as well as offline) hardly delivers photorealistic images. Some aspects where this is obvious (demos with Cinema 4D):
Soft shadows
Indirect illumination
Subsurface scattering
Blurred reflections
Caustics