I.M.O.G.E.N.E.-A Solution to the Real Time Animation Problem

Current graphics processors are very slow for displaying shaded 3D objects. A lot of work is being done in order to define faster display processors by using massive parallelism and VLSI components. Our proposal goes along this line with the supplemen­ tary aim of displaying images in real time, i.e., 25 or 30 times per second. We choose to design a graphics module without any working memory and thus without frame buffer. A massive parallelism over objects, and thus a pixel pipe-line, are used. Each Object Pro­ cessor handles one 3D object; all the processors work in a synchronous way, processing the same pixel simultaneously at pixel rate. These processors are built from very simple Elementary Processors (2 adders, 2 registers and 6 memory words) computing linear or quadratic expressions V(x,y), where (x,y) are the coordinates of a pixeL A pipelined tree made of basic operators (min, max, or, and, ... ) gathers the results given by the Ob­ ject Processors and makes inter-objects operations, at least hidden part elimination. Such a choice of course involves a high hardware complexity when displaying rather sim­ ple scenes. However, we feel that it is the price to pay for building graphics processors allowing real-time interactive animation (e.g., the graphics unit of a driving simulator).