DESIGN OF AN EXTENDED 3D GRAPHICS ENGINE

ABSTRACT 3D Applications such as games, visualization tools and Virtual Environment renderers use an internal system to manage tasks and to actually render the graphics in the display system. While the intrinsic functionalities and features can be very complex, the high level design of the system should be simple, robust and scalable. This paper presents such a high level design of a scalable and extensible design for a 3D graphics engine that follows the concepts of a general operating system. 1. INTRODUCTION Computer Graphics technology is evolving very rapidly and impressively with the development of graphics hardware and software, giving the applications more power and capabilities. However the graphics applications need to have a robust, scalable and extensible design to integrate latest rendering and shading systems. Here we present a high-level design of a graphics engine system with some extended features: a Kernel and Rendering system. The objective of such design is to keep a robust, stable internal system for every application so that the engine remains unchanged, while the applications may vary in implementation. This work is extended from our prior work on scene management in 3D graphics engines [1].