Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Fast rendering 2D projections of 3D model data

The renderer performs a high speed rendering of a Autodesk 3DS model, using OpenGL offscreen rendering. The rendered image could be pixel intensities, surface normal values or other attributes.

Given a 3DS model like this:



For a given rotation, shift and scale, a 2D projection like this is rendered. Intensity values are returned/stored in memory for further processing.




Alternatively, other attributes like surface normal components could also be rendered instead of the color intensities.

For example x, y, z components of the model surface normals have been rendered in the 3 images below.