OBJECT MODELLING

CCS 2208 Computer Graphics

Texture mapping: Motivation
Modeling the fine detail in real objects with triangles is just too
hard sometimes.

Added surface detail can help computer graphics images look

more real.

Texture mapping let’s us use real images in our CG scenes to add

realistic fine detail without the high geometric costs.
Texture mapping: Fundamentals
Textures are most often 2D images
A single element of texture is called a texel

The value of the texel is used to modify surface

appearance in some way

The mapping between texture and surface

determines how pixels and texels correspond

Texture : A detailed pattern that is repeated many

times to tile the plane.
Texture Mapping Basic Strategy
Three steps to applying a texture
1. Specify the texture
• read or generate image
• assign to texture
• enable texturing
2. Assign texture coordinates to vertices
• Proper mapping function is left to application
3. Specify texture parameters
• wrapping, filtering
Texture Mapped on to Tea Pot
Types of Texture Mapping
• Two Types
1. Forward texture mapping:
Computing 3D positions of the texture points and
then projecting them onto the image plane.

2. Inverse texture mapping:

selecting every pixel in the image plane and
finding what point of the texture plane is projected
there.
Drawbacks
• Forward Texture mapping :
Adjacent texture points may project onto non
adjacent image points, thus creating a non colored area .

• Inverse Texture Mapping :

Aliasing would appear, if sampling the texture map
is done at a frequency higher than its Nyquist rate.

Nyquist rate :the minimum theoretical sampling rate .

Basic Illumination
 Light Source Independent Models
Depth Shading
• Color or intensity determined solely by "depth" of polygon.
• Darker colors or intensities at lower elevations.
• Effective in modeling terrain or surface data
• Avoids complex calculations of lighting dependent models
• Simulates realism
Depth Cueing
• Reduce intensity of pixel as the distance from the observer
increases
• Simulates reduction in clarity as distances from the observer
increases
• Image fades in the distance
• Often used in medical imaging
 Light Source Dependent Models
What an object looks like depends on
• Properties of the light source such as color, distance from
object, direction from object, intensity of source
• Surface characteristics of object such as color and
reflectance properties
• Location of the observer

Light striking a surface of an object can be

• Reflected (Diffuse reflection & Specular reflection)
• Absorbed
• Transmitted (Translucent or transparent)
• Combination of all three
Illumination (Lighting) Model
 Illumination (lighting) model: determine the color of a
surface point by simulating some light attributes.

 Shading model: applies the illumination models at a set of

points and colors the whole image.

• To model the interaction of light with surfaces to determine

the final color & brightness of the surface, two models can
be used:
• Global illumination
• Local illumination
Global Illumination
• Global Illumination models: take into account the
interaction of light from all the surfaces in the scene.
Local illumination
• Only consider the light, the observer position, and
the object material properties
Basic Illumination Model
• Simple and fast method for calculating surface
intensity at a given point
• Lighting calculation are based on:
• The background lighting conditions
• The light source specification: color, position
• Optical properties of surfaces:
• Glossy OR matte
• Opaque OR transparent (control refection and absorption)
Components of Reflections

Ambient – surface exposed to indirect light reflected from

nearby objects.
Diffuse – reflection from incident light with equal intensity in all
directions. Depends on surface properties.
Specular – near total of the incident light around reflection angle.
 “Standard” Lighting Model
• Consists of three terms linearly
combined:
• Diffuse component for the amount of
incoming light reflected equally in all
directions

• Specular component for the amount of

light reflected in a mirror-like fashion

• Ambient term to approximate light

arriving via other surfaces
ambient diffuse

specular final
Phong Lighting Model
 Lighting or illumination refers to the technique that handles
the interaction between lights and objects.
 The most popular lighting method is based on the Phong
model. It is widely adopted in commercial games and lays
foundations of various advanced lighting techniques.

 The Phong model is composed of four terms:

 diffuse
 specular
 ambient
 emissive

Phong Lighting Model - Diffuse Term
The directional light source, such as the sun, which is quite strong and
located far from the scene, making all objects in the scene receive the
sunlight along a universal direction.
 The diffuse term is based on Lambert’s law. Reflections from ideally diffuse
surfaces (Lambertian surfaces) are scattered with equal intensity in all
directions.
 So, the amount of perceived reflection is independent of the view direction,
and is just proportional to the amount of incoming light.
 The light vector (l) is toward the light source for computational efficiency.
Phong Lighting Model - Specular Term
 The specular term is used to make a surface look shiny via
highlights, and it requires reflection vector (r) and view vector
(v) in addition to light vector (l).

 Computing the reflection vector

Phong Lighting Model – Ambient and
Emissive Terms
 The ambient light describes the light reflected from the various objects
in the scene, i.e., it accounts for indirect lighting.
 As the ambient light has bounced around so much in the scene, it
arrives at a surface point from all directions, and reflections from the
surface point are also scattered with equal intensity in all directions.

 The last term of the Phong model is the emissive term me that
describes the amount of light emitted by a surface itself.
Phong Lighting Model
 The Phong model sums the four terms!!
Local Shading Models
• Local shading models provide a way to determine the
intensity and color of a point on a surface
• The models are local because they don’t consider other objects at
all
• We use them because they are fast and simple to compute
• They do not require knowledge of the entire scene, only the current
piece of surface
Local Shading Models
• What they capture:
• Direct illumination from light sources
• Diffuse and Specular components
• (Very) Approximate effects of global
lighting

• What they don’t do:

• Shadows
• Mirrors
• Refraction
 Flat shading
• Compute shading at a representative
point and apply to whole polygon
• OpenGL uses one of the vertices

• Advantages:
• Fast - one shading value per polygon

• Disadvantages:
• Inaccurate
• Discontinuities at polygon boundaries
Gourand Shading
• In 1971, Henri Gouraud suggested that
computing the lighting at the vertices and then
interpolating the color across the triangle
could simulate the appearance of smooth
surfaces

• Shade each vertex with it’s own location and

normal
• Linearly interpolate across the face

• Advantages:
• Fast - incremental calculations when rasterizing
• Much smoother - use one normal per shared vertex to
get continuity between faces

• Disadvantages:
• Specularities get lost
 Phong Shading
• Computing lighting at the vertices is fast, but has several
limitations
• For high quality rendering, it is much more common to
compute lighting per pixel
• In order to render triangles as smooth surfaces, the most
common technique is to interpolate the normals across the
triangle and then use the interpolated normal (and position) to
compute the per-pixel lighting
• This is known as Phong shading or Phong interpolation
(not to be confused with the Phong lighting model)
• Modern graphics hardware can perform Phong shading
through the use of pixel shaders
 Phong Interpolation
• Interpolate normals across faces
• Shade each pixel

• Advantages:
• High quality, narrow specularities

• Disadvantages:
• Expensive
• Still an approximation for most surfaces
Hidden Surface Removal
Visibility
• Assumption: All polygons are opaque

• What polygons are visible with respect to your view frustum?

Outside: View Frustum Clipping
Remove polygons outside of the view volume

Inside: Hidden Surface Removal

Backface culling
Polygons facing away from the viewer
Occlusion
Polygons farther away are obscured by closer polygons

• Why should we remove these polygons?

Avoid unnecessary expensive operations on these polygons
later
Visibility of primitives
• We don’t want to waste time rendering primitives
which don’t contribute to the final image.
• A scene primitive can be invisible for 3 reasons:
• Primitive lies outside field of view
• Primitive is back-facing (under certain conditions)
• Primitive is occluded by one or more objects nearer the
viewer
• How do we remove these efficiently?
• How do we identify these efficiently?
The visibility problem.
Clipping: Remove polygons outside of the view volume

Two problems remain:

Removal of faces facing away from the viewer.
Removal of faces obscured by closer objects.
Backface Culling
• Avoid drawing polygons facing away from the viewer
 Front-facing polygons occlude these polygons in a closed
polyhedron
• Test if a polygon is front- or back-facing?

back-facing
Ideas?

front-facing
 Depth Sorting

Given a collection of polygons:

What order do we draw them in?
 Depth Sorting: Painter’s Algorithm
• Main Idea
A painter creates a picture
by drawing background
scene elements before
foreground ones

• Requirements
Draw polygons in back-to-
front order
Need to sort the polygons
by depth order to get a from Shirley

correct image
Painter’s Algorithm
• Render polygons in back to front order so that
polygons behind others are simply painted over

B behind A as seen by viewer Fill B then A

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Painter’s Algorithm - Hard Cases
No solution for:
• Cyclic ordering
• Intersecting surfaces

penetration
cyclic overlap

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