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The Computer Journal Advance Access published online on December 22, 2005
The Computer Journal, doi:10.1093/comjnl/bxh159
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Computer Society. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Received May 12, 2004
Revised October 18, 2005

Article

Hardware Oriented Algorithms for Rendering Order-Independent Transparency

M. Amor 1 *, M. Bóo 2, E. J. Padrón 1, and D. Bartz 3

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

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
M. Amor, E-mail: margamor{at}udc.es


  Abstract

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.

Keywords: computer graphics; graphics processors; visibe line/surface algorithms.
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