# Tag Info

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At the base, rendering APIs like OpenGL or Direct3D provide a unified interface to communicate with graphics adapters at a low level. Differences in hardware are hidden behind the abstraction which simplifies development a lot. The low-level APIs provide basic functionality, which gives you total control but leaves you without a lot of desired features. 3D ...

11

If you have a geometric drawing with measurements you can solve what the shape has to be. This is valuable for example in engineering as it allows you specify the requirements and the computer can then solve the constrained drawing via a solver. Image 1: Constraint solver in action, red constraints are fixed while blue ones are free to change. There are ...

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A stochastic process is one where you gather your samples randomly. So stochastic AA is antialiasing where you gather multiple samples for the same pixel with small random changes. Temporal refers to a process over time. Temporal coherence is for instance mentioned when you have no flickering artifacts, or aliasing that you see during movement. It means that ...

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Stochastic = Random. Stochastic AA, Anti-aliasing technique based on randomized sample distribution (as opposed to fixed sample pattern). Also see: Monte Carlo Method Temporal = depends on time. Temporal coherence, how consistent X is over time. Typically you hear of temporal aliasing, temporal artefacts etc.

5

I hadn't heard the phrase 'shader warming' before, but from some googling around, it seems that some games/engines use this term for a method of forcing the shaders to be fully compiled during level load, as explained in this answer, to avoid hitches during gameplay. In Metal/Vulkan/D3D12, it's true that shaders are precompiled to a bytecode form, but this ...

5

Sketchpad was a system that allowed you to draw simple shapes using lines and curves in 2D. It maintained constraints between the shapes. For example, an endpoint of one line could be constrained to lie on another line. Also, as mentioned in the Wikipedia article, the user could set a fixed length for a line, or an angle between two connected lines. These ...

4

Forward ray-tracing means that rays starts from the light source and are traced towards the eye (light-surface-eye), this is a highly inefficient but accurate method. Reverse raytracing is simply starting in the eye and then trace them towards the light source. These are two classes of ray tracers. Ray casting is the use of ray-surface intersection tests ...

4

As I said in the comments, this is indeed called torus or toroidal space when it comes to the topology. Even if the images suggest something 3 dimensional, this is just a visualization of the embedding of such a space in $\mathbb R^3$. Regarding the distance between two points, I think you mean following: Just consider the coordinates $p=(x_1,y_1)$ and \$q=(...

3

A "face" simply specifies one of the six images at a level in a cubemap (and its optional mip pyramid). It is helpful to think of level L of your mipmapped cube array texture as consisting of a 2D array of images, with exactly six columns comprising the six faces of the logical cube, and the N rows corresponding to the N layers of the array (some ...

2

Yes, this is called bilinear interpolation or a bilinear mapping. The term "bilinear" crops up more commonly in the context of image resizing or resampling, but it's the same basic idea for transforming quadrilaterals—it's just that the interpolation is applied to the vertex positions of the quad, instead of the colors of pixels in an image. One paper that ...

1

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Generative art (Wikipedia) doesn't necessarily start with an image as the input, and ASCII art can be drawn/typed by hand (in a text editor) especially for ASCII line art (which I've often used for diagrams) or "oldskool" ASCII art. While there may be overlap, generative art is neither a synonym nor a hypernym for ASCII art. Note that your pen-plotter ...

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