Computer Graphics from Scratch (2017)

Have you ever written about your game development company and how you managed to get the contracts to produce the Ghost Whisperer and other games?

This guy graphics! I remember my highest pleasure in programming was attained when I first drew a rasterized triangle. Of uniform color.

But when you've been futzing around with quaternions all day, and your camera finally stops acting like a hyperactive husky who hasn't had a walk in days...well, I imagine that's close to what it felt like when they got the internal combustion engine to stop being an external combustion engine.

Worth noting that neither method is particularly physically based, and really just boils down to whether you approach the rasterization task "forwards" or "backwards". Which method ends up faster is essentially a function of how much geometry and how many pixels you have.

A ray tracer, on the other hand, is (sometimes) looping over pixels in the outer loop, and then iterating over objects (“traversing the scene”) in the inner loop.

The existing names are also good descriptors in the sense that they describe the core of what must be computed. A rasterizer always rasterizes. A ray tracer always traces rays but does not always result in pixels, the result can end up in a spatial data structure, it can trace resolution independent shadows & reflections, it can save results in a cache that gets rasterized later, it can end up in multiple pixels (splatting, pixel filtering), etc., etc.. Yes it’s very common to render pixels with a ray tracer, but it’s not required or inherently part of the algorithm, while rasterization doesn’t exist without pixels.

You're technically correct (the best kind of correct!). Since raytracers draw pixels on the screen, and the screen is an array of horizontal lines, anything that draws pixels to the screen is a rasterizer.

On the other hand, "polygon-pushers" are rasterizers in a deeper sense: triangles are explicitly sliced into arrays of horizontal line segments, and this shapes how everything else works in them, e.g. the need to interpolate attribute values along the edges of each triangle so you can then interpolate them along each raster, etc. Raytracers do no such thing. So all renderers are rasterizers, but some are more rasterizer than others ;)

I also wonder what happens, for the sake of brainstorming, if you change the output to be something that is not a rectangular array of horizontal sets of pixels. In that case you probably wouldn't call a raytracer "a rasterizer" since there would be no raster data, but a polygon pusher would still fit the name, since it uses rasters internally?

BTW, I'll never accept "literally" used as "figuratively", "there" for "they're", or "could care less" unless you do care a little bit. So I don't think you're a jerk, and your comment prompted some interesting thinking!

I admit, that's a rare example (though not unique; there's a reason wire-frames, as a display mode, came into existence). But I think it's absurd to say that the rasterizer is the heart of the polygon-transforming approach; the heart is the transformation matrix.

What did you read prior to undertaking the project? How did you know what you needed to build? Have you been working in graphics awhile?

I would totally read any blog post or postmortem writeup you have if you decide to publish your results.