Expand description
The exact half of the drawing pipeline.
The polygonal path draws what the mesh says: silhouettes are interior mesh edges whose triangles disagree about facing the eye, and visibility is occlusion sampling against the triangles. Both are as good as the chord, and no better.
This is the other half. A silhouette is where the surface’s own normal turns perpendicular to the view, which for the elementary surfaces is a curve with a closed form: a great circle on a sphere, a pair of rulings on a cylinder or a cone. Visibility is decided by asking the faces whether anything stands between a point and the eye: an exact curve/surface interference and a trim test, not a triangle count. What is still sampled is the drawing itself, because a drawing is polylines; the curves it samples and the classification it carries are exact.
A surface whose silhouette has no closed form (a torus, a spline) is refused by name rather than approximated here. The polygonal path draws those, and says so.
Structs§
- Silhouette
- One silhouette curve, and the face it belongs to.
Functions§
- iso_
curves - The isoparametric curves of a face:
u_countat constantu,v_countat constantv, each trimmed to the stretches that lie on the face. - project_
exact - Project a shape into a drawing whose silhouettes and visibility are exact.
- reflect_
lines - The reflect lines of a shape under a light: where the surface turns away from the light rather than from the eye.
- silhouettes
- The exact silhouettes of a shape, seen along
direction.