Our new text rendering code is 5x faster (in a bad case) than our STK code - and the new code uses the same algorithm! How's that work? Well, we are using the same algorithm but the implementation is vastly different. In this post, I'll describe the new implementation, which offloads work from the CPU to a vertex shader running on the GPU, enabling the use of static vertex buffer objects.
Archive for the 'Primitives' Category
In Point Break, primitives form the building blocks of a 3D scene. Developers create primitives and initialize them with information, such as position and attitude. Primitives then take care of all the 3D rendering (drawing) and optimizations, allowing developers to focus on their application code.
- Models – Support for the industry standard COLLADA format and AGI’s MDL format.
- Markers –2D images that always face the viewer and remain a constant pixel size. Markers are commonly used to visualize a large number of tracks moving in real-time.
- Polylines – Used for rendering lines on the ground or in space. Polylines are used to visualize many things including country borders, drop lines, range rings, and access lines. Polyline variants can conform to terrain when drawn on the ground.
- Triangle Meshes – The rendering workhorse for things such as area targets (e.g. states or countries), terrain and imagery extents, ground ellipses, and border walls. The surface mesh, a triangle mesh variant, can conform to terrain when drawn on the ground.
