The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Apr. 10, 2001
Filed:
May. 29, 1998
John Snyder, Redmond, WA (US);
James F. Blinn, Bellevue, WA (US);
Jerome E. Lengyel, Seattle, WA (US);
Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA (US);
Abstract
An image generator takes graphical objects and an occlusion relationship for the objects and resolves non-binary occlusion cycles with image compositing operations to produce an output image of the objects. The image generator takes an occlusion relationship for objects in a scene and a set of antialiased image layers with transparency of the objects and produces an antialiased image of the objects with hidden surfaces eliminated. One implementation operates on subsets of the objects in a scene that form non-binary cycles. This implementation uses a chain of atop operators to combine occluding objects with a selected object from a subset, and then combines this result with other objects in the cycle using over image operations. Another implementation computes a chain of out image operations for each object to combine the image layers of the occluding objects with the image layer of the object. The results of each chain of out image operations are summed to produce an output image.