Revision as of 18:44, 20 May 2010

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Category: Rendering

This page is to help game artists understand how a game engine renders their artwork.

Game Rendering Terms

It helps to understand the terms a graphics programmer uses, so you can talk the talk.

Terms to define:

• Draw call
• Texture fetch (see )
• Fill rate
• Transform cost
• Frame rate
• Frame buffer
• VRAM, video memory
• vertex shader
• pixel shader
• culling
  If the view camera (the viewer's eye) can't see it, don't bother processing it and only worry about what the view camera can see. # Trivial Accept/Reject Culling, Back-Face Culling, Occlusion Culling, Clipping.
• z-buffer, Depth Buffer

Threads to distill:

• FAQ: Game art optimisation (do polygon counts really matter?)
• How many textures per model is too many?
• ["Polygon Count"]
• DevMaster wiki Graphics topics

Offline Rendering vs. Real-Time Rendering

• "Offline rendering systems, such as those used in CAD applications, stress accuracy over frame rate... each frame of animation might take hours to render. Real-time renderers, like game engines and simulators, tend to emphasize constant frame rate to keep animations smooth and fluid, and are willing to sacrifice both geometric and texture detail in order to do this." - from the ExtremeTech 3D Pipeline Tutorial by Dave Salvator

Game Rendering Primers

These articles help artists understand how game engines work, so they can learn how to build art that performs better.

• Beautiful, Yet Friendly Part 1: Stop Hitting the Bottleneck - by Guillaume Provost
• Beautiful, Yet Friendly Part 2: Maximizing Efficiency - by Guillaume Provost
• ExtremeTech 3D Pipeline Tutorial - by Dave Salvator

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