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#### The Lessons of Listing 65.3

There are several interesting points to Listing 65.3. First, floating-point arithmetic is used throughout the clipping process. While it is possible to use fixed-point, doing so requires considerable care regarding range and precision. Floating-point is much easier—and, with the Pentium generation of processors, is generally comparable in speed. In fact, for some operations, such as multiplication in general and division when the floating-point unit is in single-precision mode, floating-point is much faster. Check out Chris Hecker’s column in the February 1996 Game Developer for an interesting discussion along these lines.

Second, the planes that form the frustum are shifted ever so slightly inward from their proper positions at the edge of the field of view. This guarantees that it’s never possible to generate a visible vertex exactly at the eyepoint, averting the divide-by-zero error that such a vertex would cause when projected and at no performance cost.

Third, the orientation of the viewer relative to the world is specified via yaw, pitch, and roll angles, successively applied in that order. These angles are accumulated from frame to frame according to user input, and for each frame are used to rotate the view up, view right, and viewplane normal vectors, which define the world coordinate system, into the viewspace coordinate system; those transformed vectors in turn define the rotation from worldspace to viewspace. (See Chapter 61 for a discussion of coordinate systems and rotation, and take a look at Chapters 5 and 6 of Computer Graphics, by Foley and van Dam, for a broader overview.) One attractive aspect of accumulating angular rotations that are then applied to the coordinate system vectors is that there is no deterioration of the rotation matrix over time. This is in contrast to my X-Sharp package, in which I accumulated rotations by keeping a cumulative matrix of all the rotations ever performed; unfortunately, that approach caused roundoff error to accumulate, so objects began to warp visibly after many rotations.

Fourth, Listing 65.3 processes each input polygon into a clipped polygon, one line segment at a time. It would be more efficient to process all the vertices, categorizing whether and how they’re clipped, and then perform a test such as the Cohen-Sutherland outcode test to detect trivial acceptance (the polygon is entirely inside) and sometimes trivial rejection (the polygon is fully outside) without ever dealing with the edges, and to identify which planes actually need to be clipped against, as discussed in “Line-Segment Clipping Revisited,” Dr. Dobb’s Journal, January 1996. Some clipping approaches also minimize the number of intersection calculations when a segment is clipped by multiple planes. Further, Listing 65.3 clips a polygon against each plane in turn, generating a new output polygon for each plane; it is possible and can be more efficient to generate the final, clipped polygon without any intermediate representations. For further reading on advanced clipping techniques, see the discussion starting on page 271 of Foley and van Dam.

Finally, clipping in Listing 65.3 is performed in worldspace, rather than in viewspace. The frustum is backtransformed from viewspace (where it is defined, since it exists relative to the viewer) to worldspace for this purpose. Worldspace clipping allows us to transform only those vertices that are visible, rather than transforming all vertices into viewspace, then clipping them. However, the decision whether to clip in worldspace or viewspace is not clear-cut and is affected by several factors.

### Advantages of Viewspace Clipping

Although viewspace clipping requires transforming vertices that may not be drawn, it has potential performance advantages. For example, in worldspace, near and far clip planes are just additional planes that have to be tested and clipped to, using dot products. In viewspace, near and far clip planes are typically planes with constant z coordinates, so testing whether a vertex is near or far-clipped can be performed with a single z compare, and the fractional distance along a line segment to a near or far clip intersection can be calculated with a couple of z subtractions and a divide; no dot products are needed.

Similarly, if the field of view is exactly 90 degrees, so the frustum planes go out at 45 degree angles relative to the viewplane, then x==z and y==z along the clip planes. This means that the clipping status of a vertex can be determined with a simple comparison, far more quickly than the standard dot-product test. This lends itself particularly well to outcode-based clipping algorithms, since each compare can set one outcode bit.

For a game, 90 degrees is a pretty good field of view, but can we get the same sort of efficient clipping if we need some other field of view? Sure. All we have to do is scale the x and y results of the world-to-view transformation to account for the field of view, so that the coordinates lie in a viewspace that’s normalized such that the frustum planes extend along lines of x==z and y==z. The resulting visible projected points span the range -1 to 1 (before scaling up to get pixel coordinates), just as with a 90-degree field of view, so the rest of the drawing pipeline remains unchanged. Better yet, there is no cost in performance because the adjustment can be added to the transformation matrix.

I didn’t implement normalized clipping in Listing 65.3 because I wanted to illustrate the general 3-D clipping mechanism without additional complications, and because for many applications the dot product (which, after all, takes only 10-20 cycles on a Pentium) is sufficient. However, the more frustum clipping you’re doing, especially if most of the polygons are trivially visible, the more attractive the performance advantages of normalized clipping become.

### Further Reading

You now have the basics of 3-D clipping, but because fast clipping is central to high-performance 3-D, there’s a lot more to be learned. One good place for further reading is Foley and van Dam; another is Procedural Elements of Computer Graphics, by David F. Rogers. Read and understand either of these books, and you’ll know everything you need for world-class clipping.

And, as you read, you might take a moment to consider how wonderful it is that anyone who’s interested can tap into so much expert knowledge for the price of a book—or, on the Internet, for free—with no strings attached. Our part of the world is a pretty good place right now, isn’t it?

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Graphics Programming Black Book © 2001 Michael Abrash