Appeal No. 2002-1491
Application 08/845,526
The appellant’s specification has no special definition for the term “render” in the
graphics context. However, the Gharachorloo reference explains this term of art in its
Background of the Invention portion as follows (Column 1, lines 26-29):
To “render” a graphics entity is to convert the entity from its high level form
ultimately to pixel data, which is stored in a frame buffer having a location for
each pixel being displayed.
That explanation is consistent with how the term is used in the appellant’s specification.
The independent claims are claims 1, 9, 13, 16, and 20, of which claims 1 and 9 expressly
state that the NURBS defined curve or surface is rendered without first converting the NURBS
defined curve or surface to a polygonal mesh, and claim 20 recites a method of using the
graphics rendering pipeline to render a curve or surface “directly” from a NURBS (non-uniform
rational B-spline) model.
Claim 1 is reproduced below:
1. In a computer system having a processor, a bus, and a graphics rendering
pipeline for displaying 3D graphics on a display, a computer implemented method
for rendering a NURBS defined curve or surface without first converting the
NURBS defined curve or surface to a polygon mesh, the method comprising the
computer implemented steps of:
a) receiving a NURBS model for rendering from a software program running
on the processor of the computer system;
b) converting the NURBS model to a Bezier model using the graphics
rendering pipeline;
c) generating a plurality of Bezier control points from a corresponding
plurality of NURBS control points using a tri-linear interpolator in the graphic
pipeline by:
4
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