ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors examine the interactive graphics pipeline. The camera model in the synthesis pipeline is essentially the same as the pinhole camera model, but they arrive at the same equations from different directions and use it differently. Rasterization is the last step of the interactive graphics pipeline where all the pixels inside the clipped polygons have to be computed, and colors and other attributes interpolated from those of the vertices of the polygon. The rasterization process is applied to each primitive and it proceeds line by line from top left of the window to the bottom right. An axis-aligned bounding box for each primitive can be computed by just finding the minimum and maximum extent of the vertices in the horizontal and vertical direction. One way to improve performance is to make sure that intersection computations are only performed when there is a high probability that the primitive actually intersects the window boundaries.
