DESIGN PRINCIPLES OF HARDWARE-BASED PHONG SHADING AND BUMP-MAPPING

The VISA+ hardware architecture is the first of a new generation of gr aphics accelerators designed primarily to render bump-, texture-, envi ronment- and environment-bump-mapped polygons. This paper presents exa mples of the main graphical capabilities and discusses methods and sim plifications used to create high quality images. One of the key concep ts in the VISA+ design, the use of reflectance cubes, is predestined f or environment mapping. In combination with bump- and texture-mapping it shows the strength of our new architecture. Furthermore it justifie s some of the decisions made during simulation and development of the complex VISA+ architecture. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.