PIPELINE RENDERING - INTERACTIVE REFRACTIONS, REFLECTIONS AND SHADOWS

A coordinated use of hardware-provided bitplanes and rendering pipelin es can create ray-trace quality illumination effects in real time. We provide recursive reflections through the use of secondary viewpoints, and present a method for using a homogeneous 2D projective image mapp ing to extend this method for refractive surfaces. We extend the tradi tional use of shadow volumes to provide reflected and refracted shadow s as well as reflected and refracted lighting. A shadow blending techn ique is demonstrated, and the shadow and lighting effects are incorpor ated into our recursive viewpoint paradigm. Finally, we incorporate ma terial properties including a translucency model to provide a general framework for creating physically approximate renderings. These techni ques are immediately applicable to areas such as 3D modelling, animati on and interactive environments to produce more realistic images in re al time.