Software Rendering

About a year ago, I took a class on software rasterization. It really helped me understand everything that DirectX/Opengl does underneath the hood. We started out by rasterizing 2D lines and images and then moved onto a full 3D renderer all done in software (i.e. on the cpu). It was a pretty cool class. The focus of the class was mainly on implementation rather than performance, so it isn't as fast as other software renderers.

I wrote the rasterizer using c#, and the Tao opengl framework (only for sending the pixel information to the graphics card with glDrawPixels()). I posted this on image of the day at gamedev: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=446142

Here's what I had accomplished by the end of the semester:

• Gouraud shading
• Phong shading
• Blinn and Phong specular reflection
• Directional and Point lights
• Perspective correct texture mapping
• Normal Mapping
• Parallax Mapping
• Projective Texturing
• Shadow Mapping
• Environment Mapping - for skybox and distant reflections
• Distance Fog
• Depth of Field
• Bilinear Filtering
• Camera Interpolation, for movie creation

environment mapped reflections:










perspective correct texture mapping:














depth of field:














distance based fog:














parallax mapping:














shadow mapping with percentage closer filtering: