Rendering (computer graphics) in the context of Level of detail (computer graphics)

This is a list of models and meshes commonly used in 3D computer graphics for testing and demonstrating rendering algorithms and visual effects. Their use is important for comparing results, similar to the way standard test images are used in image processing.

In architecture and building engineering, a floor plan is a technical or diagrammatic drawing that illustrates the horizontal relationships of interior spaces or features to one another at one level of a structure. They are typically drawn to-scale and in orthographic projection to represent relationships without distortion. They are usually drawn approximately 4 ft (1.2 m) above the finished floor and indicate the direction of north.

The level of detail included on a floor plan is directly tied to its intended use and phase of design. For instance, a plan produced in the schematic design phase may show only major divisions of space and approximate square footages while one produced for construction may indicate the construction types of various walls. Floor plans may indicate specific dimensions or square footages for particular rooms and/or walls. They may also include details of fixtures (sinks, water heaters, furnaces, etc), notes to specify finishes, construction methods, or symbols for electrical items. They may be rendered or drafted.

Pixar (/ˈpɪksɑːr/), doing business as Pixar Animation Studios, is an American animation studio based in Emeryville, California, known for its critically and commercially successful computer-animated feature films. Pixar is a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios, a division of the Disney Entertainment segment of the Walt Disney Company.

Pixar started in 1979 as part of the Lucasfilm computer division. It was known as the Graphics Group before its spin-off as a corporation in 1986, with funding from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who became its majority shareholder. Disney announced its acquisition of Pixar in January 2006, and completed it in May 2006. Pixar is best known for its feature films, technologically powered by RenderMan, the company's own implementation of the industry-standard RenderMan Interface Specification image-rendering API. The studio's mascot is Luxo Jr., a desk lamp from the studio's 1986 short film of the same name.

OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardware-accelerated rendering.

Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) began developing OpenGL in 1991 and released it on June 30, 1992. It is used for a variety of applications, including computer-aided design (CAD), video games, scientific visualization, virtual reality, and flight simulation. Since 2006, OpenGL has been managed by the non-profit technology consortium Khronos Group.

Graphic art software is a subclass of application software used for graphic design, multimedia development, stylized image development, technical illustration, general image editing, or simply to access graphic files. Art software uses either raster graphics or vector graphics reading and editing methods to create, edit, and view art.

Many artists and other creative professionals today use personal computers rather than traditional media. Using graphic art software may be more efficient than rendering using traditional media by needing less eye–hand coordination and less mental imaging skill, and using the computer's quicker (sometimes more accurate) automated rendering functions to create images. However, advanced level computer styles, effects and editing methods may need a steeper learning curve of computer technical skills than what was needed to learn traditional hand rendering and mental imaging skills. The potential of the software to enhance or hinder creativity may depend on the intuitiveness of the user interface.

Radiance is a suite of tools for performing lighting simulation originally written by Greg Ward. It includes a renderer as well as many other tools for measuring the simulated light levels. It uses ray tracing to perform all lighting calculations, accelerated by the use of an octree data structure. It pioneered the concept of high-dynamic-range imaging, where light levels are (theoretically) open-ended values instead of a decimal proportion of a maximum (e.g. 0.0 to 1.0) or integer fraction of a maximum (0 to 255 / 255). It also implements global illumination using the Monte Carlo method to sample light falling on a point.

Greg Ward started developing Radiance in 1985 while at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The source code was distributed under a license forbidding further redistribution. In January 2002 Radiance 3.4 was relicensed under a less restrictive license.

In 3D computer graphics, a wire-frame model (also spelled wireframe model) is a visual representation of a three-dimensional (3D) physical object. It is based on a polygon mesh or a volumetric mesh, created by specifying each edge of the physical object where two mathematically continuous smooth surfaces meet, or by connecting an object's constituent vertices using (straight) lines or curves.

The object is projected into screen space and rendered by drawing lines at the location of each edge. The term "wire frame" comes from designers using metal wire to represent the three-dimensional shape of solid objects. 3D wireframe computer models allow for the construction and manipulation of solids and solid surfaces. 3D solid modeling efficiently draws higher quality representations of solids than conventional line drawing.

A whitespace character is a character data element that represents white space when text isrendered for display by a computer.

For example, a space character (U+0020   SPACE, ASCII 32) represents blank space such as a word divider in a Western script.

In 3D computer graphics and solid modeling, a polygon mesh is a collection of vertices, edges and faces that defines the shape of a polyhedral object's surface. It simplifies rendering, as in a wire-frame model. The faces usually consist of triangles (triangle mesh), quadrilaterals (quads), or other simple convex polygons (n-gons). A polygonal mesh may also be more generally composed of concave polygons, or even polygons with holes.

The study of polygon meshes is a large sub-field of computer graphics (specifically 3D computer graphics) and geometric modeling. Different representations of polygon meshes are used for different applications and goals. The variety of operations performed on meshes includes Boolean logic (Constructive solid geometry), smoothing, and simplification. Algorithms also exist for ray tracing, collision detection, and rigid-body dynamics with polygon meshes. If the mesh's edges are rendered instead of the faces, then the model becomes a wireframe model.

In computing, a voxel is a representation of a value on a three-dimensional regular grid, akin to the two-dimensional pixel. Voxels are frequently used in the visualization and analysis of medical and scientific data (e.g. geographic information systems (GIS)). Voxels also have technical and artistic applications in video games, largely originating with surface rendering in Outcast (1999). Minecraft (2011) makes use of an entirely voxelated world to allow for a fully destructible and constructable environment. Voxel art, of the sort used in Minecraft and elsewhere, is a style and format of 3D art analogous to pixel art.

As with pixels in a 2D bitmap, voxels themselves do not typically have their position (i.e. coordinates) explicitly encoded with their values. Instead, rendering systems infer the position of a voxel based upon its position relative to other voxels (i.e., its position in the data structure that makes up a single volumetric image). Some volumetric displays use voxels to describe their resolution. For example, a cubic volumetric display might be able to show 512×512×512 (or about 134 million) voxels.

Pixar RenderMan is a photorealistic 3D rendering software produced by Pixar Animation Studios. Pixar uses RenderMan to render their in-house 3D animated movie productions and it is also available as a commercial product licensed to third parties. In 2015, a free non-commercial version of RenderMan became available.

The RenderMan Interface Specification, or RISpec in short, is an open API developed by Pixar Animation Studios to describe three-dimensional scenes and turn them into digital photorealistic images. It includes the RenderMan Shading Language.

As Pixar's technical specification for a standard communications protocol (or interface) between modeling programs and rendering programs capable of producing photorealistic-quality images, RISpec is a similar concept to PostScript but for describing 3D scenes rather than 2D page layouts. Thus, modelling programs which understand the RenderMan Interface protocol can send data to rendering software which implements the RenderMan Interface, without caring what rendering algorithms are utilized by the latter.

Foveated rendering is a rendering technique which uses an eye tracker integrated with a virtual reality headset to reduce the rendering workload by greatly reducing the image quality in the peripheral vision (outside of the zone gazed by the fovea).

A less sophisticated variant called fixed foveated rendering doesn't utilise eye tracking and instead assumes a fixed focal point.

A graphic character, also known as a printing character or a printable character, is a grapheme intended to be rendered in a form that can be read by a human. In other words, it is any encoded character that is associated with one or more glyphs. (It is thus distinct from a control character, one that is acted upon and not displayed.)

Image fidelity, often referred to as the ability to discriminate between two images or how closely the image represents the real source distribution. Different from image quality, which is often referred to as the subject preference for one image over another, image fidelity represents to the ability of a process to render an image accurately, without any visible distortion or information loss. The two terms are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same.

If we cannot detect the difference between a photograph and a digitally printed image, we might conclude that the digital print has photographic image quality. But subjective impressions of image quality are much more difficult to characterize and, consequently, nearly impossible to quantify. It is not difficult to demonstrate that people use multiple visual factors or dimensions in complex non-linear combinations to make judgements about image quality. There are also significant individual differences in their judgements.

In machine learning, a neural field (also known as implicit neural representation, neural implicit, or coordinate-based neural network), is a mathematical field that is fully or partially parametrized by a neural network. Initially developed to tackle visual computing tasks, such as rendering or reconstruction (e.g., neural radiance fields), neural fields emerged as a promising strategy to deal with a wider range of problems, including surrogate modelling of partial differential equations, such as in physics-informed neural networks.

Differently from traditional machine learning algorithms, such as feed-forward neural networks, convolutional neural networks, or transformers, neural fields do not work with discrete data (e.g. sequences, images, tokens), but map continuous inputs (e.g., spatial coordinates, time) to continuous outputs (i.e., scalars, vectors, etc.). This makes neural fields not only discretization independent, but also easily differentiable. Moreover, dealing with continuous data allows for a significant reduction in space complexity, which translates to a much more lightweight network.

A stencil buffer is an extra data buffer, in addition to the color buffer and Z-buffer, found on modern graphics hardware. The buffer is per pixel and works on integer values, usually with a depth of one byte per pixel. The Z-buffer and stencil buffer often share the same area in the RAM of the graphics hardware.

In the simplest case, the stencil buffer is used to limit the area of rendering (stenciling). More advanced usage of the stencil buffer makes use of the strong connection between the Z-buffer and the stencil buffer in the rendering pipeline. For example, stencil values can be automatically increased/decreased for every pixel that fails or passes the depth test.

In computer graphics, a mipmap (mip being an acronym of the Latin phrase multum in parvo, meaning "much in little") is a pre-calculated, optimized sequence of images, each of which has an image resolution which is a factor of two smaller than the previous. Their use is known as mipmapping.

They are intended to increase rendering speed and reduce aliasing artifacts. A high-resolution mipmap image is used for high-density samples, such as for objects close to the camera; lower-resolution images are used as the object appears farther away. This is a more efficient way of downscaling a texture than sampling all texels in the original texture that would contribute to a screen pixel; it is faster to take a constant number of samples from the appropriately downfiltered textures. Since mipmaps, by definition, are pre-allocated, additional storage space is required to take advantage of them. They are also related to wavelet compression.