The saga of wireframe rendering continues. We begin by expanding the capabilities of Rendertoy, our 3D visualization tool, so it can use different rendering modes. This allows us to compare the results of two different rendering techniques. The first is a two-pass method that renders a line mesh on top of an opaque triangle mesh. The second is what we’ve come to refer to as “Steve shading”, a one-pass method that does tricky math in the fragment shader.
We spend ages fiddling with the one-pass method but don’t quite get anything to render, only to realize moments after we finished the stream that we didn’t select the correct render mode with our fancy new selector. Software is great.
Notes/highlights
- A stencil buffer allows you to restrict which areas of the framebuffer get rendered: https://learnopengl.com/Advanced-OpenGL/Stencil-testing
- A really nice Blender tutorial, wherein you make a donut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyJWoyVx_XI&list=PLjEaoINr3zgEq0u2MzVgAaHEBt--xLB6U
- HTML5 semantic elements, which aren’t great in practice but must’ve seemed like a good idea at the time they were invented: https://html.com/html5/#Encouraging_Semantic_Markup