A NORMAL-BUFFER VECTORIZED SURFACE SHADING MODEL

Abstract

A surface rendering implementation is described that separates visibility operations from surface shading operations with a Normal-Buffer data structure. This allows for scene complexity independent shading operations at a fixed computational cost per frame. The Normal-Buffer approach also allows the implementation of a fully vectorized surface-shading algorithm when the shading model is applied to each pixel in the scene. The vectorized shader is described using an array processor with a directly attatched frame store in a high performance scene-generation system.