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The Computer Journal Advance Access originally published online on December 22, 2005
The Computer Journal 2006 49(2):201-210; doi:10.1093/comjnl/bxh159
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Computer Society. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Hardware Oriented Algorithms for Rendering Order-Independent Transparency

M. Amor1,*, M. Bóo2, E. J. Padrón1 and D. Bartz3

1 Department of Electronics and Systems, University of A Coruña, Spain
2 Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering, University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain
3 WSI/GRIS-VCM, University of Tübingen, Germany

* Corresponding author: margamor{at}udc.es

The demand for high quality and speed in graphical representations of 3D scenes is continuously increasing. An important aspect of visual realism is real-time processing of transparent objects. In order to provide a realistic solution to be considered for future graphics cards, proposed extensions to the hardware need to be small. In this paper, we propose two new hardware oriented proposals for computing order independent transparency for any number of layers. The first proposal is based on the precomputation of the contribution factor of each element to the final colour of the pixel. This permits the evaluation of the transparent objects without requiring their previous sorting. The second proposal is based on the utilization of a pre-sorting stage so that the transparent objects are organized in a back to front order. In both proposals, time requirements are reduced with respect to previous solutions.

Key Words: computer graphics • graphics processors • visibe line/surface algorithms


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