Texturing 3-dimensional computer graphic images

摘要

A method and apparatus are provided to generate automatically a mip-map chain of texture images from a portion of texture image data such that it may be used in texturing a computer graphic image. A portion of the texture image data is stored temporarily and is filtered to generate at least one lower level of mip-map data from the texture data. This lower level of mip-map texture image data is then stored for use in texturing. Preferably these are stored on a tile-by-tile basis where a tile is a rectangular area of the image being displayed.

主权项

1. A computer graphics rendering system, comprising:
a main memory hierarchy comprising a frame buffer portion for storing data for pixels of a rendered image; a hardware unit configured to
derive image data associated with a tile of pixels of an image to be rendered;dynamically generate texels for a mipmap level of a tile of an environment map, wherein the tile is a subset of the environment map and is generated at a first resolution,store the tile of the environment map in a local buffer that is local to the hardware unit,access texels of the tile of the environment map from the local buffer, andgenerate one or more reduced-resolution versions of the accessed texels of the tile of the environment map,apply, within the hardware unit, the generated one or more reduced-resolution versions of the accessed texels in a texturing operation with the derived image data associated with the tile of pixels of the image to be rendered, and tooutput textured image data for storage in the main memory hierarchy.