Week Two - 3D Graphics

In 3D graphics, we rely on triangles because more than 2 points are needed to draw a plane through 3D space, and therefore, triangles - with three points - are the simplest snap that satisfies this requirement. They do not have any extra points and so there is only one way to draw a 3d plane through them, avoiding confusion.

The painters algorithm renders objects in a scene starting with the background and moving forward in order to handle the occlusion of objects. It is named such because painters also have to start with the background and work forward. The Z-Buffer algorithm also handles occlusion but does so by keeping a matrix of distance values for each pixel. It only overwrites pixels when one would be closer, which is faster. When two polygons are at the same distance, however, using the Z-Buffer algorithm can result in Z-fighting where two polygons are vying to be seen.

The surface normal of the floor is simply straight upwards. However, an object such as my face which has many different orientations is more complicated and would require more complex algorithms and computations to track all of the different surface normals for each piece of my face in order to calculate lighting.

The section of the video explaining the advantages of GPU's for parallel graphics processing was interesting to me. While I knew GPU's were used for graphics instead of CPU's I did not know why. I am glad the video touched on this and am interested to research the actual functions and advantages of different computer components in the future.