Computer Graphics from Scratch

15EXTENDING THE RASTERIZER

We’ll conclude this second part of the book the same way we concluded the first one: with a set of possible extensions to the rasterizer we’ve developed in the preceding chapters.

Normal Mapping

In Chapter 13, we saw how the normal vectors of a surface have a big impact on its appearance. For example, the right choice of normals can make a faceted object look smoothly curved; this is because the right choice of normals changes the way light interacts with the surface, which in turn changes the way our brain guesses the shape of the object. Unfortunately, there’s not much more we can do by interpolating normals beyond ...