Real-Time Rendering, Fourth Edition, 4th Edition

Chapter 13 Beyond Polygons

DOI: 10.1201/b22086-13

“Landscape painting is really just a box of air with little marks in it telling you how far back in that air things are.”

—Lennart Anderson

Modeling surfaces with triangles is often the most straightforward way to approach the problem of portraying objects in a scene. Triangles are good only up to a point, however. A great advantage of representing an object with an image is that the rendering cost is proportional to the number of pixels rendered, and not to, say, the number of vertices in a geometrical model. So, one use of image-based rendering is as a more efficient way to render models. However, image-sampling techniques have a much wider use than this. Many objects, such as clouds ...