Appeal No. 1998-0426
Application No. 08/307,028
BACKGROUND
The appellant's invention relates to a computer-implemented method of rendering
an image of smoke. An understanding of the invention can be derived from a reading of
exemplary claim 1, which is reproduced below.
1. A computer-implemented method of rendering an image of smoke or clouds in an
image generator for display of pixels on a display device, said method comprising the
steps of:
modeling the smoke as a sphere having nonuniform smoke density, and that
is comprised of a center point in three-dimensional model space, a radius,
and set of parameters defining its nonuniform density and color;
transforming the center point to screen coordinates;
transforming the radius to a screen coordinate radius;
generating a bounding polygon that surrounds a projection of the sphere in
screen coordinates;
clipping the bounding polygon to boundaries of the display device; and
for each pixel in the image, rendering a smoke effect by:
testing if the pixel is within the bounding polygon;
computing an equivalent translucency factor for the smoke at the pixel
based upon location of the pixel with respect to the transformed
center point, the screen coordinate radius, the set of parameters
defining its nonuniform density and color, and penetration depth
through the smoke; and
computing the smoke effect for the pixel based upon the equivalent
translucency factor.
2
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