The Cone of Normals Technique for Fast Processing of Curved Patches

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Date
1993
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association
Abstract
The cone of normals technique for curved surface patches allows to perform various quick tests at the patch level such as front- or backfacing test, light influence test, and existence of silhouette edges test. For a given patch, a truncated cone of normals is constructed at creation time, which contains all points and all normal directions of the patch. At traversal time, a simple scalar product test determines whether the whole patch is backfacing or frontfacing, so that the costly step of tessellating the patch is avoided in case of patch level face culling. In addition, the technique quickly determines which light sources have no influence on a patch, and which patches have no silhouette edges. The technique can also be used for other surface primitives, such as triangular strips and quadrilateral meshes,
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@article{
10.1111:1467-8659.1230261
, journal = {Computer Graphics Forum}, title = {{
The Cone of Normals Technique for Fast Processing of Curved Patches
}}, author = {
Shirmun, Leon A.
and
Abi-Ezzi, Salim S.
}, year = {
1993
}, publisher = {
Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association
}, ISSN = {
1467-8659
}, DOI = {
10.1111/1467-8659.1230261
} }
Citation