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# Texture Mapping

Graphics and GPU Programming

(Editor's Note - this article requires additional formatting work and is incomplete)

Written for the PC-GPE

[hr]almost everything you need to know to texture map with the PC [hr]
Copyright 1994 Sean Barrett.
Not for reproduction (electronic or hard copy) except for personal use.

[size="5"]Contents

0 - warnings

1 - terminology and equations
2 - the basics
Perfect texture mapping
DOOM essentials
Wraparound textures
Non-rectangular polygons
3 - the hazards
going off the texture map
divide by 0
it'll never be fast enough
4 - the complexities
handling arbitrarily-angled polygons
lighting
slow 16-bit VGA cards
mipmapping

[bquote]Note:
I am not providing any references as I simply derived the math myself and worked out the various techniques for myself (the 32-bit ADC trick was pointed out to me in another context by TJC, author of the Mars demo) over the last two years (since Wolfenstein 3D and Underworld came out). [/bquote]

[size="5"]0. Warnings

I assume a RIGHT-handed 3D coordinate system, with X positive to the right, Y positive disappearing into the screen/distance, and Z positive up. To adjust this to the typical left-handed 3D space, simply swap all the 3D Ys & Zs.

I assume the screen space is positive-X to the right, positive-Y goes down. Adjust the signs as appropriate for your system.

I will present code and pseudo-code in C. I also include some relatively tight inner loops written in assembly, but I'm omitting the details of the loop setup. The inner loops, while usually from real, working code, should generally be taken as examples showing how fast it ought to be possible to run a given task, not as necessarily perfect examples. I often use 32-bit instructions (sorry 286 programmers) because they can double the performance. However, I write in real mode, because 16-bit addressing is often convenient for texture maps, and it's straightforward to use segment registers as pointers to texture maps. The translation to protected mode should not prove problematic, but again, these should more be taken as examples rather than simply being used directly. I optimize for the 486, but I skip some obvious optimizations. For example, I write "loop", because it's simpler and more clear. Production code for the 486 should explicitly decrement and then branch. Similarly, I write "stosb", etc. etc.

[size="5"]1. Terminology and Equations

You really probably don't want to read this section first, but rather refer back to it whenever you feel the need. So skip up to section 2 and refer back as appropriate. I could've made this an appendix, but it seems too important to put last.

[size="3"]Terms

texture:
A texture is a pixelmap of colors which is mapped onto a polygon using "texture mapping". The size of the polygon has nothing to do with the size (the number of pixels) in the texture map.

run: A run is a row or column of pixels. Normal texture mapping routines process one run in an "inner loop".

arbitrarily-angled polygon:A polygon which isn't a floor, wall, or ceiling; technically, a polygon which isn't parallel to the X or Z axes (or X or Y axes in a Z-is-depth coordinate system).

texture space, polygon space, polygon coordinate space: Since a texture is flat, or two-dimensional, the relation of the texture to the 3D world can be described with a special coordinate space known by one of these names. Because it is only 2D, the space can be characterized with the location of the texture space in 2D, and two 3D vectors which represent the axes of the coordinate space. Sometimes called "uv" space, because the name of the coordinates are usually u & v.

[size="3"]Notation

Vectors appear in all caps. Components of vectors are P = < Px, Py, Pz >.

Certain variables have consistent usage:
[bquote]x,y,z are coordinates in three-space
i,j are screen coordinates
u,v are coordinates in texture space
a,b,c are "magic coordinates" such that u = a/c, v = b/c [/bquote]

[size="3"]Equations

Don't let this scare you off! Go read section 2, and come back to this when you're ready.

Let P,M, and N be vectors defining the texture space: P is the origin, and M and N are the vectors for the u&v axes.

Assume these vectors are in _view space_, where view space is defined as being the space in which the transformation from 3D to 2D is:

(x,y,z) -> (i,j) i = x / y j = z / y
In other words, you have to adjust P, M, and N to be relative to the view, and if you have multiplications in your perspective computation, you have to multiply the appropriate components of P, M, and N to compute them. Note that since typically in 3D up is positive, and in 2D down is positive, there may be a multiplication by -1 that needs to go into Py, My, Ny. Note that this also assumes that (0,0) in screen space is at the center of the screen. Since it's generally not, simply translate your screen coordinates (i,j) as if they were before applying the texture mapping math (or if you're funky you can modify your viewspace to pre-skew them).

For example, if your transforms are:

i = Hscale * x / y + Hcenter j = -Vscale * z / y + Vcenter
Then you should simply multiply Px, Mx, and Nx by Hscale, and multiply Py, My, and Mz by -Vscale. Then just remember to subtract Hcenter and Vcenter from the i,j values right before plugging them into the texture mapping equations.

We begin by computing 9 numbers which are constant for texture mapping the entire polygon (O stands for Origin, H for Horizontal, and V for vertical; why I use these names should become clear eventually):

Oa = Nx*Pz - Nz*Px Ha = Nz*Py - Ny*Pz Va = Ny*Px - Nx*Py Ob = Mx*Pz - Mz*Px Hb = Mz*Py - My*Pz Vb = My*Px - Mx*Py Oc = Mz*Nx - Mx*Nz Hc = My*Nz - Mz*Ny Vc = Mx*Ny - My*Nx
Ok. Then, for a given screen location (i,j), the formula for the texture space (u,v) coordinates corresponding to it is:

a = Oa + i*Ha + j*Va b = Ob + i*Hb + j*Vb c = Oc + i*Hc + j*Hc u = a/c v = b/c
[size="5"]2. The Basics

So you've got your polygon 3D engine running, and you'd like to start adding a bit of texture to your flat- or Gouraud-shaded polygons. Well, it will make it look a lot cooler. But let's point out the disadvantages of texture mapping right away:
• Slower
• Sometimes hard to see polygon edges Each of these has certain ramifications on the overall approach you want to take with your code, which we'll come back to later, in sections 3 and 4.

Practical advice: Don't try to get your riproaringly fast texture mapper running first. Get a very simple, slow, "perfect" texture mapper working first, as described in the first subsection below. This will allow you to make sure you've gotten the equations right. Realize that I can't present the equations appropriate to every scenario, since there are simply too many spaces people can work in. I've chosen to present the math from an extremely simple coordinate space which keeps the texture mapping relatively simple. You'll have to work out the correct transformations to make it work right, and a slow but correct texture mapping routine may help you tweak the code as necessary to achieve this. Use very simple polygons to start your testing; centered and facing the viewer should be your very first one (if done correctly, this will simply scale the texture).

[size="3"]Perfect Texture Mapping

To start with, we'll do slow but exact "perfect" texture mapping of a square tile with a simple texture map mapped onto it. The polygon is defined in three-space using four points, and the texture map is 256x256 pixels. Note that this is all talking about using floating point, so those of you working in C or Pascal are fine. Those in assembly should realize that you have to do a bit of extra work to use fixed point, or you can beat out the floating point by hand if you want.

First we have to "map" the texture onto the polygon. We have to define how the square texture map corresponds to the square polygon. This is relatively simple. Let one corner of the polygon be the origin (location <0,0>) of the texture map. Let each of the other corners correspond to corners just off the edge of the texture map (locations <256, 0>, <256, 256>, and <0, 256>).

We'd like to use the equations in section 1, which require vectors P, M, and N, where P is the origin, and M & N are the axes for u&v (which are _roughly_ the coordinates in the texture map, but see below). In other words, P, M and N tells us where the texture lies relative to the polygon. P is the coordinate in three-space where the origin of the texture is. M tells us which way the "horizontal" dimension of the texture lies in three-space, and N the "vertical".

Suppose the polygon has four vertices V[0], V[1], V[2], and V[3] (all four of these are vectors). Then, P is simply V[0]. M is a vector going from the origin to the corner <256, 0>, so M is a vector from V[0] to V[1], so M = V[1] - V[0]. N is a vector from the origin to the corner <0, 256>, so N is V[3] - v[0].

P = V[0] M = V[1] - V[0] { note these are vector subtractions } N = V[3] - V[0]
Again, remember that we need P, M, and N in the viewspace discussed with the equation, so make sure you've transformed the Vs appropriately, or you can compute P, M, and N in world or object space and transform them into viewspace.

Compute the 9 magic numbers (vectors O, H, and V) as described in section 1. Now, take your 3D polygon and process it as normal. Scan convert it so that you have a collection of rows of pixels to process.

Now, iterate across each row. For each pixel in the polygon whose screen coordinates are , apply the rest of the math described in section 1; that is, compute a, b, and c, and from them compute .

I said before that are basically the texture map coordinates. What they are in truth are the coordinates in texture map space. Because of the way we defined texture map space, we'll actually find that u and v both run from 0..1, not 0..256. This is an advantage for descriptive purposes because u and v are always 0 to 1, regardless of the size of the texture map.

So, to convert u&v to pixelmap coordinates, multiply them both by 256. Now, use them as indices into the texture map, output the value found there, and voila, you've texture mapped!

The loop should look something like this:

[ loop #1 ] for every j which is a row in the polygon screen = 0xA0000000 + 320*j for i = start_x to end_x for this row a = Oa + (Ha * i) + (Va * j) b = Ob + (Hb * i) + (Vb * j) c = Oc + (Hc * i) + (Vc * j) u = 256 * a / c v = 256 * b / c screen = texture_map[v] endfor endfor
Once you've got that working, congratulations! You're done dealing with the annoying messy part, which is getting those 9 magic numbers computed right. The rest of this is just hard grunt work and trickery trying to make the code faster.

From here on in, I'm only going to look at the inner loop, that is, a single run (row or column), and let the rest of the runs be understood.

[size="3"]Prepare to meet thy DOOM

This subsection is concerned with vastly speeding up texture mapping by restricting the mapper to walls, floors and ceilings, or what is commonly called DOOM-style texture mapping, although it of course predates DOOM (e.g. Ultima Underworld
• , Legends of Valour).

[* Yes, Underworld allowed you to tilt the view, but it distorted badly. Underworld essentially used DOOM-style tmapping, and tried to just use that on arbitrarily-angled polygons. I can't even begin to guess what Underworld II was doing for the same thing.]

To begin with, let's take loop #1 and get as much stuff out of the inner loop as we can, so we can see what's going on. Note that I'm not going to do low-level optimizations, just mathematical optimizations; I assume you understand that array walks can be turned into pointer walks, etc.

[ loop #2 ] a = Oa + Va*j b = Ob + Vb*j c = Oc + Vc*j a += start_x * Ha b += start_x * Hb c += start_x * Hc for i = start_x to end_x u = 256 * a / c v = 256 * b / c screen = texture_map[v] a += Ha b += Hb c += Hc endfor
With fixed point math, the multiplies by 256 are really just shifts. Furthermore, they can be "premultiplied" into a and b (and Ha and Hb) outside the loop.

Ok, so what do we have left? Three integer adds, a texture map lookup, and two extremely expensive fixed-point divides. How can we get rid of the divides?

This is the big question in texture mapping, and most answers to it are _approximate_. They give results that are not quite the same as the above loop, but are difficult for the eye to tell the difference.

However, before we delve into these, there's a very special case in which we can get rid of the divides.

We can move the divide by c out of the loop without changing the results IFF c is constant for the duration of the loop. This is true if Hc is 0. It turns out that Hc is 0 if all the points on the run of pixels are the same depth from the viewer, that is, they lie on a line of so-called "constant Z" (I would call it "constant Y" in my coordinate system).

The requirement that a horizontal line of pixels be the same depth turns out to be met by ceilings and floors. For ceilings and floors, Hc is 0, and so the loop can be adjusted to:

[ loop #3 ] __setup from loop #2__ u = 256 * a / c v = 256 * b / c du = 256 * Ha / c dv = 256 * Hb / c for i = start_x to end_x screen = texture_map[v] u += du v += dv endfor
Now _that_ can be a very fast loop, although adjusting the u&v values so they can be used as indices has been glossed over. I'll give some sample assembly in the next section and make it all explicit.

First, though, let's look at walls. Walls are almost identical to floors and ceilings. However, with walls, Vc is 0, instead of Hc. This means that to write a loop in which c is constant, we have to walk down columns instead of across rows. This affects scan-conversion, of course.

The other thing about walls is that with floors, since you can rotate about the vertical axis (Z axis for me, Y axis for most of you), the horizontal runs on the floors cut across the texture at arbitrary angles. Since you're bound to not tilt your head up or down, and since the polygons themselves aren't tilted, you generally find that for walls, Va is 0 as well. In other words, as you walk down a column of a wall texture, both a & c are constant, so u is constant; you generally only change one coordinate, v, in the texture map. This means the inner loop only needs to update one variable, and can be made to run _very_ fast.

The only thing missing from this discussion for creating a DOOM clone is how to do transparent walls, how to do lighting things, and how to make it fast enough. These will be discussed in section 4, although the some of the speed issue is addressed by the inner loops in the next subsection, and the rest of the speed issue is discussed in general terms in section 3.

[size="3"]...wrapped around your finger...

So far, we've only looked at texture mapping a single polygon. Of course, it's obvious how to texture map a lot of polygons--just lather, rinse, repeat. But it may seem sort of wasteful to go through all the 3D math and all over and over again if we just want to have one long wall with the same texture repeating over and over again--like linoleum tiles or wallpaper.

Well, we don't have to. Let's think about this idea of a "texture map space" some more. We defined it as being a coordinate system "superimposed" on the polygon that told us where the texture goes. However, when we implemented it, we simply used the polygon itself (in essence) as the coordinate space.

To see this, make a polygon which is a rectangle, perhaps four times as long as it is tall. When it is drawn, you will see the texture is distorted, stretched out to four times its length in one dimension. Suppose we wanted it to repeat four times instead?

The first step is to look at what the definition of the texture map space means. The texture map space shows how the physical pixelmap itself goes onto the polygon. To get a repeating texture map, our first step is to just get one of the copies right. If we set up our P,M, & N so that the M only goes one quarter of the way along the long edge of the rectangle, we'll map the texture onto just that quarter of the rectangle.

Here's a picture to explain it:

 Polygon A-B-C-D Texture map A E u=0 u=1 o--------o-___________ B v=0 11112222 |111112222 ---------o 11112222 |111112222 | 33334444 |111112222 | 33334444 |333334444 | v=1 |333334444 | |333334444 ___________---------o o--------o- C D F
So, we used to map (u,v)=(0,0) to A, (u,v)=(1,0) to B, and (u,v) = (0,1) to D. This stretched the texture map out to fill the entire polygon map.

Now, instead, we map (u,v)=(1,0) to E. In other words, let P = A, M = E-A, and N = D-A. In this new coordinate space, we will map the texture onto the first quarter of the polygon.

What about the rest of the polygon? Well, it simply turns out that for the first quarter 0 <= u <= 1. For the rest, 1 <= u <= 4.

To make the texture wrap around, all we have to do is ignore the integer part of u, and look at the fractional part. Thus, as u goes from 1 to 2, we lookup in the texture map using the fractional part of u, or (u-1).

This is all very simple, and the upshot is that, once you define P, M, and N correctly, you simply have to mask your fixed-point u&v values; this is why we generally use texture maps whose sides are powers of two, so that we can mask to stay within the texture map. (Also because they fit conveniently into segments this way, and also so that the multiply to convert u&v values from 0..1 to indices is just a shift.)

I'm assuming that's a sufficient explanation of the idea for you to get it all setup. So here's the assembly inner loops I promised. I'm not going to bother giving the ultra-fast vertical wall-drawing case, just the horizontal floor/ceiling-drawing case.

Note that a mask of 255 (i.e. for a 256x256 texture) can be gotten for free; however, no program that I'm aware of uses texture maps that large, since they simply require too much storage, and they can cache very poorly in the internal cache.

First, here's your basic floor/ceiling texture mapper, in C, with wraparound, and explicitly using fixed point math--but no setup.

[ loop #4 ] mask = 127, 63, 31, 15, whatever. for (i=0; i < len; ++i) { temp = table[(v >> 16) & mask][(u >> 16) & mask]; u += du; v += dv; }
Now, here's an assembly one. This one avoids the shifts and does both masks at the same time, and uses 16 bits of "fractional" precision and however many bits are needed for the coordinates. Note that I assume that the texture, even if it is 64x64, still has each row starting 256 bytes apart. This just requires some creative storage approaches, and is crucial for a fast inner loop, since no shifting&masking is required to assemble the index.

 mov al,mask mov ah,mask mov mask2,ax ; setup mask to do both at the same time loop5 and bx,mask2 ; mask both coordinates mov al,[bx] ; fetch from the texture map stosb add dx,ha_low ; update fraction part of u adc bl,ha_hi ; update index part of u add si,hb_low ; these are constant for the loop adc bh,hb_hi ; they should be on the stack loop loop5 ; so that ds is free for the texture map
This code is decent, but nowhere near as fast as it can be. The main trick to improving performance is to use 32 bit adds instead of two adds. The problem with this is that extra operations are required to setup the indexing into the texture map. Through the use of the ADC trick, these can be minimized. In the following code, bl and bh are unchanged. However, the top half of EBX now contains what used to be in si, and the other values have been moved into registers. ESI contains hb_low in the top half, and ha_hi in the low 8 bits. This means that ADC EBX,ESI achieves the result of two of the additions above. Also, we start using BP, so we move our variables into the data segment and the texture map into FS.

 loop6 and bx,mask2 mov al,fs:[bx] stosb add dx,bp ; update fractional part of u adc ebx,esi ; update u (BL) and frac. part of v (EBX) adc bh,ch ; update index part of v dec cl jnz loop6
This is a bit faster, although it has one bug. It's possible for the addition into BL to overflow into BH. It might not seem to be, since BL is masked every iteration back down to stay in 0..127, 0..63, or whatever. However, if the step is negative, then BL will be decremented each iteration, and may "underflow" and subtract one from BH. To handle this, you need a separate version of the loop for those cases.

If you're not doing wraparound textures, you can speed the loop up a bit more by removing the and. You can run entirely from registers except for the texture map lookup. Additionally, unrolling the loop once cuts down on loop overhead, and is crucial if you're writing straight to the VGA, since it doubles your throughput to a 16-bit VGA card.

Here's a very fast no-wraparound texture mapper. It uses the ADC trick twice. Note that the carry flag is maintained around the loop every iteration; unfortunately the 'and' required for wraparound textures clears the carry flag (uselessly). EBX and EDX contain u & v in their bottom 8 bits, and contain the fractional parts of v & u in their top bits (note they keep the _other_ coordinate's fractional parts). You have to have prepped the carry flag first; if you can't figure this technique out, don't sweat it, or look to see if someone else has a more clear discussion of how to do fast fixed-point walks using 32-bit registers.

This loop is longer because it does two pixels at a time.

 loop7 mov al,[bx] ; get first sample adc edx,esi ; update v-high and u-low adc ebx,ebp ; update u-high and v-low mov bh,dl ; move v-high into tmap lookup register mov ah,[bx] ; get second sample adc edx,esi adc ebx,ebp mov bh,dl mov es:[di],ax ; output both pixels inc di ; add 2 to di without disturbing carry inc di dec cx jnz loop7
I went ahead and 486-optimized the stosw/loop at the end to make cycle-counting easier. All of these instructions are single cycle instructions, except the branch, and the segment-override. So you're looking at roughly 15 cycles for every two pixels. Your caching behavior on the reads and writes will determine the actual speed. It can be unrolled another time to further reduce the loop overhead; the core operations are 9 instructions (10 cycles) for every two pixels. Note the "inc di/inc di", which protects the carry flag. If you unroll it again, four "inc di"s will be required. Unroll it another time, and you're better off saving the carry flag, adding, and restoring, for example "adc ax,ax/add di,8/shr ax,1", rather than 8 "inc di"s.

[size="3"]Lost My Shape (trying to act casual)

Non-rectangular polygons are trivial under this system. Some approaches require you to specify the (u,v) coordinates for each of the vertices of the polygon. With this technique, you instead specify the 3D coordinates for three of the "vertices" of the texture map. So the easiest way of handling a texture of a complex polygon is simply to use a square texture which is larger than the polygon. For example:

P1 P2 x B _______ C x / \ / \ A / \ \ / D \ / \ _______ / x F E P3
Now, we simply define the texture map such that P is P1, M is P2-P1, and N is P3-P1. Then, if our texture looks like this:

 u=0 u=1 ------------ v=0 |..XXoooooo.. |.XXXXoooooo. |XXXXXXoooooo |.XXXXXXoooo. v=1 |..XXXXXXoo..
Then the regions marked by '.' in the texture map will simply never be displayed anywhere on the polygon.

Wraparound textures can still be used as per normal, and concave polygons require no special handling either.

Also, you can get special effects by having M and N not be perpendicular to each other.

[size="5"]3. The Hazards

This sections discusses some of the pitfalls and things-aren't-quite-as-simple-as-they-sounded issues that come up while texture mapping. All of the information is, to some extent, important, whether you've encountered this problem or not.

[size="3"]Cl-cl-cl-close to the Edge

At some time when you're texture mapping, you'll discover (perhaps from the screen, perhaps from a debugger) that your U & V values aren't within the 0..1 range; they'll be just outside it.

This is one of these "argh" problems. It is possible through very very careful definition of scan-conversion operations to avoid it, but you're likely to encounter it.

If you use wraparound textures, you may not ever notice it, however, since when it happens, the texture will simply wraparound and display an appropriate pixel.

If not, you may get a black pixel, or just garbage. It'll only happen at the edges of your polygon.

The reason this happens is because your scan-conversion algorithm may generate pixels "in the polygon" whose pixel-centers (or corners, depending on how you've defined it) are just outside the texture--that is, they're outside the polygon itself.

The right solution to this is to fix your scan-converter. If your texture mapper computes u&v coordinates based on the top-left corner of the pixel (as the one I've defined so far has), make sure your scan-converter only generates pixels whose top-left corner is really within the polygon. If you do this, you may need to make a minor change to my definition of M & N, but I'm not going to discuss this further, since you probably won't do this.

A second option is to define P, M, and N such that the texture map space is slightly bigger than the polygon; that is, so that if you go just off the edge of the polygon, you'll still be within the texture map.

This is a pain since you end up having to transform extra 3D points to do it.

The third, and probably most common solution, is to always use wraparound textures, which hide the problem, but prevent you from using textures that have one edge that highly contrasts with another.

The fourth, and probably second most common solution, and the one that turns out to be a real pain, is to "clamp" the u&v values to be within the texture all the time.

Naively, you just put this in your inner loop:

if (u < 0) u = 0; else if (u > 1) u = 1; if (v < 0) v = 0; else if (v > 1) v = 1;
Of course, you don't really do this, since it'd slow you down far too much. You can do this outside the loop, clamping your starting location for each run. However, you can't, under this system, clamp the ending value easily.

Remember that in the loop we update u and v with (essentially) Ha/c and Hb/c. These are constant across the entire run, but not constant across the entire polygon, because c has different values for different runs.

We can compute du and dv in a different way to allow for clamping. What we do is we explicitly compute (a,b,c) at (start_x, j) as we did before, but we also compute (a,b,c) at (end_x, j). From these we compute (u,v) at start_x & at end_x. Next we clamp both sets of u & v. Then we compute du and dv with

du = (u2 - u1) / (end_x - start_x - 1) dv = (v2 - v1) / (end_x - start_x - 1)
This is slightly more expensive than the old way, because we have to compute u2 and v2, which requires extra divides. However, for methods that explicitly calculate u&v sets and then compute deltas (and we'll see some in section 4), this is the way to go.

One final thing you can do is interpolate the (a,b,c) triple from the vertices as you scan convert. This will guarantee that all (a,b,c) triples computed will lie be within the polygon, and no clamping will be necessary (but deltas must still be computed as above). However, you have to make sure the (a,b,c) values you compute at the vertices are clamped themselves, which is not too hard by a bit more complicated than clamping (u,v) values.

[size="3"]Out of This Domain -- Zero's Paradox

Divides by zero are ugly. We programmers don't like them. If this were an ideal world (a quick nod to mathematicians and some physicists), the texture mapping equations would be divide-by-zero-free.

Unfortunately, it's a repercussion of the exact same problem as above that you can bump into them.

Remember above, I noted that it's possible to get (u,v) pairs with a value just outside of the 0..1 range, because a pixel we're texture mapping isn't even in the polygon?

Well, even worse, it's possible for this pixel, which isn't in the polygon, to be along the horizon line (vanishing point) for the polygon. If this happens, your Y value (sorry, Z for most of you) would be infinite if you tried to compute the 3D coordinates from the screen coordinates; and in the (u,v) computation, you end up with a 0 value for c. Since u = a/c, blammo, divide by 0.

Well, the solution is simple. Test if c is 0, and if it is, don't divide. But what _should_ you do?

Well, let's look at an "even worse" case. Suppose the pixel is so far off the polygon it's across the horizon line. In this case, we'll end up with c having the "wrong" sign, and while our divide won't fault on us, our u&v values will be bogus.

What do we do then?

We can't clamp our a&b&c values very easily. Fortunately, it turns out we don't have to. If this happens, it means the edge of the polygon must be very close to the horizon, or the viewer must be very, very flat to the polygon (if you know what I mean). If so, the viewer can't really tell what should be "right" for the polygon, so if we screw up the u&v values, it really doesn't matter.

So the answer is, don't worry if c gets the wrong sign, and if c comes out to be 0, use any value for u&v that you like--(0,0) makes an obvious choice.

I've never had a serious problem with this, but it is possible that this could actually give you some pretty ugly results, if, say, two corners of a polygon both "blew up", and you treated them both as being (0,0). It can also cause problems with wraparound polygons not repeating the right amount.

[size="3"]Do the Dog

Most polygon 3D graphics engines probably use the painter's algorithm for hidden surface removal. You somehow figure out what order to paint the polygons in (depth sort, BSP trees, whatever), and then paint them back-to-front. The nearer polygons obscure the farther ones, and voila!, you're done.

This works great, especially in a space combat simulator, where it's rare that you paint lots of pixels.

You can texture map this way, too. For example, Wing Commander II doesn't texture map, but it does real time rotation, which involves essentially the same inner loop. Wing Commander II is fast--until a lot of ships are on the screen close to you, at which point it bogs down a bit.

If you care about not slowing down too much in the above case, or you want to do an "indoor" renderer with lots of hidden surfaces, you'll find that with texture mapping, you can ill-afford to use the painter's algorithm.

You pay a noticeable cost for every pixel you texture map. If you end up hiding 80% of your surfaces (i.e. there are five "layers" everywhere on the screen), you end up "wasting" 80% of the time you spend on texture mapping.

To prevent this, you have to use more complex methods of hidden surface removal. These will probably slow you down somewhat, but you should make up for it with the gain in texture mapping.

The essential idea is to only texture map each screen pixel once. To do this, you do some sort of "front-to-back" painting, where you draw the nearest surface first. Any pixel touched by this surface should never be considered for drawing again.

There are many ways to do this. You can process a single scanline or column at a time and use ray-casting or just "scanline processing", then resolve the overlap between the runs with whatever method is appropriate. You can stay polygonal and maintain "2D clipping" information (a data structure which tracks which pixels have been drawn so far).

Beyond getting a fast inner loop for texture mapping, getting a fast hidden-surface-removal technique (and a fast depth-sorting technique if appropriate) is probably the next most crucial thing for your frame rate.

But the details are beyond the scope of this article.

Note that if you attempt to use a Z-buffer, you will still end up paying all of the costs of texture mapping for every forward-facing polygon (or at least 50% of them if you get really tricky; if you get really, really tricky, the sky's the limit.) I strongly doubt that any PC game now out, or that will come out in the next year, will render full-screen texture mapping through a Z-buffer. (Superimposing a rendered image on a Z-buffered background is a different issue and is no doubt done all the time.)

[size="5"]4. The Complexities

In this section we will discuss lots of miscellaneous topics. We'll look at some more optimizations, such as considerations for dealing with slow VGA cards, and how to texture map arbitrarily-angled polygons without doing two divides per pixel. We'll talk about a technique that lets you use textures with high-frequency components, and one way to integrate lighting into texture-mapping.

[size="3"]Arbitrarily-Angled Polygons

First suggestion: Don't. Set up your world to have all (or mostly) walls and floors. Supporting arbitrarily-angled polygons is going to slow you down, no matter what.

The original texture mapping loop, which supported arbitrarily-angled polygons, required two divides per pixel. We don't have to go that slow, but we'll never go as fast as DOOM-style rendering can go. (However, as you start to use more sophisticated lighting algorithms in your inner loop, the cost of handling arbitrarily-angled polygons may start to become less important.)

There is one way to texture map such polygons "perfectly" without two divides per pixel, and a host of ways to do it "imperfectly". I'll discuss several of these ways in varying amounts of detail. Your best bet is to implement them all and see which ones you can get to run the fastest but still look good. You might find that one is faster for some cases but not for others. You could actually have an engine which uses all the methods, depending on the polygon it's considering and perhaps a "detail" setting which controls how accurate the approximations are.

The "perfect" texture mapping algorithm is described in another article, "Free-direction texture mapping". I'll summarize the basic idea and the main flaw. The basic idea is this. For ceilings and walls, we were able to walk along a line on the screen for which the step in the "c" parameter was 0; this was a line of "constant Z" on the polygon.

It turns out that every polygon has lines of "constant Z"--however, they can be at any angle, not necessarily vertical or horizontal.

What this means, though, is that if you walk along those lines instead of walking along a horizontal or vertical, you do not need a divide to compute your texture map coordinates, just deltas.

The details can be found in the other article. The slope of the line to walk on the screen is something like Hc/Vc.

Note, however, that the "DOOM" approach was _just_ an optimization for a special case. The wall & ceiling renderers produce exactly the same results as a perfect texture mapper, for the polygons that they handle (ignoring rounding errors and fixed-point precision effects). This is not true for the "free-direction" texture mapper. While there is a line across the screen for which the polygon has constant Z, you cannot walk exactly along that line, since you must step by pixels. The end result is that while in the texture map space, you move by even steps, in the screen space, you move with ragged jumps. With perfect texture mapping, you always sample from the texture map from the position corresponding to the top-left/center of each pixel. With the free-direction mapper, you sample from a "random" location within the pixel, depending on how you're stepping across the screen. This "random" displacement is extremely systematic, and leads to a systematic distortion of the texture. I find it visually unacceptable with high-contrast textures, compared to perfect texture mapping, but you should try it and decide for yourself. The technically inclined should note that this is simply the normal "floor" renderer with an extra 2D skew, and that while 2D skews are trivial, they are non-exact and suffer from the flaw described above.

The only other alternative for arbitrarily-angled polygons is to use some kind of approximation. We can characterize u and v as functions of i (the horizontal screen position; or use 'j' if you wish to draw columns); for instance, u = a / c, where a = q + i*Ha, c = p + i*Hc. So we can say u(i) = (q + i*Ha) / (r + i*Hc).

Now, instead of computing u(i) exactly for each i, as we've done until now, we can instead compute some function u'(i) which is approximately equal to u(i) and which can be computed much faster.

There are two straightforward functions which we can compute very fast. One is the simple linear function we used for DOOM-style mapping, u'(x) = r + x*s. Since the function we're approximating is curved (a hyperbola), a curved function is another possibility, such as u'(x) = r + x*s + x^2*t. (SGI's Reality Engine apparently uses a cubic polynomial.)

If you try both of these approximations on a very large polygon at a sharp angle, you will find that they're not very good, and still cause visible curvature. They are, of course, only approximations. The approximations can be improved with a simple speed/quality trade-off through subdivision. The idea of subdivision is that the approximation is always of high quality for a small enough region, so you can simply subdivide each region until the subregions are small enough to have the desired quality.

There are two ways to subdivide. One simple way is to subdivide the entire polygon into smaller polygons. This should be done on the fly, not ahead of time, because only polygons that are at "bad" angles need a lot of subdivision. After dividing a polygon into multiple smaller ones, render each one separately. Use the original P, M, and N values for all of the new polygons to make the texture remain where it should be after subdivision.

The (probably) better way to subdivide is to subdivide runs instead of polygons, and so I'll discuss this in more detail. The essential thing is that to do an approximation, you evaluate the original function at two or more locations and then fit your approximate function to the computed values. One advantage of run subdivision is that you can share points that you evaluated for one subrun with those of the next.

First lets turn back to the two approximations under consideration. The first is what is called "bilinear texture mapping", because the function is linear and we're tracking two ("bi") values. To use this method, we compute the function at both endpoints: u1 = u(start_x), u2 = u(end_x). Then we compute our start and step values. To keep things simple, I'm going to assume the approximation function u'(x) is defined from 0..end_x-start_x, not from start_x..end_x.

So, the linear function u'(x) = r + s*x, where u'(0) = u1 and u'(end_x - start_x) = u2 is met by letting r = u1, s = (u2 - u1) / (end_x - startx).

Now, suppose our run goes from x = 10 to x = 70. If we evaluate u(10), u(20), u(30), u(40),... u(70), then we can have six seperate sections of bilinear texture mapping.

For a quadratic, there are several ways to compute it. One way is to compute an additional sample in the middle; u3 = u((start_x + end_x)/2). Then we can fit u1,u2, and u3 to u'(x) = r + s*x + t*x^2 with:

len = (end_x - start_x) k = u1 + u2 - u3*2 r = u1 s = (u2 - u1 - 2*k)/len t = 2*k / len^2
Note that to use this in code, you cannot simply use a loop like this:

r += s; s += t;
because the r,s, and t values aren't correct for discrete advancement. To make them correct, do this during the setup code:

R = r S = s + t T = 2*t
Then the loop of (...use R..., R += S, S += T) will work correctly.

The biquadratic loop will be slower than the linear loop, but will look better with fewer subdivisions. You can share one of the endpoints from one biquadratic section to the next. Note, though, that you require twice as many calculations of u&v values for the same number of subdivisions with a biquadratic vs. a bilinear.

Another thing to do is to choose how to subdivide the run more carefully. If you simply divide it in half or into quarters, you'll discover that some of the subruns come out looking better than others. So there are some things you can do to improve the subdivision system. Another thing you can do is to try to make most of your subruns have lengths which are powers of two. This will let you use shifts instead of divides when computing r,s, and t, which cuts down on your overhead, which lets you use more subdivisions and get the same speed.

Note something very important. Subdivision increases the overhead per run; biquadratic and other things increase the cost of the inner loop. Before you go crazy trying to optimize your arbitrarily-angled polygon renderer, make sure you're rendering some "typical" scenes. The "right" answer is going to depend on whether you have lots of very shorts runs or fewer, longer runs. If you optimize based on a simple test case, you may end up suboptimal on the final code.

You probably still want to have both a column-based and a row-based renderer, and use whichever one the polygon is "closer to" (e.g. if Hc is closer to 0 than Vc, use the row-based). Note that the free-direction renderer looks its worst (to me) for very small rotations, i.e. when Hc or Vc are very close to 0. Since in these cases not much subdivision is needed, even if you choose to use a free-direction mapper as your primary renderer, you might still want to have "almost wall" and "almost floor" renderers as well.

Finally, there is one more approximation method you can use, which is faster than any of the ones discussed so far, but is simply totally and utterly wrong. This is the approach used by Michael Abrash in his graphics column in Dr. Dobbs. While it's quite wrong, it works on polygons which are entirely constant Y (sorry, Z), and can be a noticeable speedup.

What you do is 2D (instead of 3D) interpolation. You mark each vertex with its coordinates in the texture map. Then when you scan convert, you interpolate these values between vertices on the edges of your runs. Thus, scan conversion will generate runs with (u,v) values for the left and right end. Now simply compute (du,dv) by subtracting and dividing by the length (no clamping will be necessary), and use your fast bilinear inner loop. When combined with 3D polygon subdivision, this approach can actually be useful.

A cheat:

When the player is moving, set your internal quality settings a little lower. When the player stops, switch back to the normal quality; if the player pauses the game, render one frame in normal quality.

If done right, you can get a small boost to your fps without anyone being able to tell that you did it. You may have to use normal quality if the player is only moving very slowly, as well.

Note that while this may sound like an utterly cheap trick just to improve the on-paper fps number, it's actually quite related to the "progressive refinement" approach used by some real VR systems (which, when the viewer isn't moving, reuse information from the previous frame to allow them to draw successive frames with more detail).

There are a number of ways of improving this cheat intelligently. If the player is moving parallel to a polygon, that polygon will tend to be "stably" texture mapped (similar mapping from frame to frame). If there is any distortion from your approximation, this will be visible to the player. So this means a rule of thumb is to only cheat (draw with above-average distortion) on polygons that are not facing parallel to the direction of motion of the player.

[size="3"]Light My Fire

If you're texture mapping, it's generally a good idea to light your polygons. If you don't light them, then it may be difficult to see the edge between two walls which have the same texture (for instance, check out the "warehouse" section of registered DOOM, which is sometimes confusing when a near crate looks the same color as a far crate).

Lighting is actually pretty straightforward, although you take a speed hit in your inner loop. I'm not going to worry about actual lighting models and such; see other articles for discussion on how to do light-sourced polygons.

Instead I'm going to assume you've computed the lighting already. We'll start with "flat-run" shading, wherein an entire run has the same intensity of light falling on it.

DOOM uses flat-run shading. A given polygon has a certain amount of light hitting it, which is the same for the entire polygon. In addition, each run of the polygon is sort-of lit by the player. Since runs are always at a constant depth, you can use constant lighting across the run and still change the brightness with distance from the player (DOOM uses something that resembles black fog, technically).

So the only real issue is _how_ you actually get the lighting to affect the texture. Several approaches are possible, but the only one that I think anyone actually uses is with a lighting table.

The lighting table is a 2D array. You use the light intensity as one index, and the pixelmap color as the other index. You lookup in the table, and this gives you your final output color to display. (With two tables, you can do simple dithering.) So the only thing you have to do is precompute this table.

Basically, your inner loop would look something like this:

...compute light... for (i=start_x; i <= end_x; ++i) { color = texture[v >> 16][u >> 16]; output = light_table[light][color]; screen = output; u += du; v += dv; }
The next thing to consider is to Gouraud shade your texture map. To do this, you need to compute the light intensity at the left and right edge of the run; look elsewhere for more details on Gouraud shading.

Once you've got that, you just do something like this:

z = light1 << 16; dz = ((light2 - light1) << 16) / (end_x - start_x); for (i=start_x; i <= end_x; ++i) { color = texture[v >> 16][u >> 16]; output = light_table[z >> 16][color]; screen = color; u += du; v += dv; z += dz; }
Note that you shouldn't really do this as I've written the code. light1 and light2 should be calculated with 16 bits of extra precision in the first place, rather than having to be shifted left when computing z. I just did it that way so the code would be self-contained.

I'm going to attempt to give a reasonably fast assembly version of this. However, there's a big problem with doing it fast. The 80x86 only has one register that you can address the individual bytes in, and also use for indexing--BX. This means that it's a real pain to make our inner loop alternate texture map lookup and lighting fetch--whereas it's almost trivial on a 680x0. I avoid this somewhat by processing two pixels at a time; first doing two texture map lookups, then doing two lighting lookups.

Here's a flat-shading inner loop. I'm doing this code off the top of my head, so it may have bugs, but it's trying to show at least one way you might try to do this. Since I use BP, I put variables in the FS segment, which means DS points to the texture, GS to the lighting table.

 mov ch,fs:light adc ax,ax loop8 shr ax,1 ; restore carry mov cl,[bx] ; get first sample, setting up cx for color lookup adc edx,esi ; update v-high and u-low adc ebx,ebp ; update u-high and v-low mov bh,dl ; move v-high into tmap lookup register mov ah,[bx] ; get second sample, save it in ah adc edx,esi adc ebx,ebp mov dh,bl ; save value of bl mov bx,cx ; use bx to address color map mov al,gs:[bx] ; lookup color for pixel 1 mov bl,ah ; switch to pixel 2 mov ah,gs:[bx] ; lookup color for pixel 2 mov es:[di],ax ; output both pixels mov bl,dh ; restore bl from dh mov bh,dl adc ax,ax ; save carry so we can do CMP add di,2 cmp di,fs:last_di ; rather than having to decrement cx jne loop8
For a Gouraud shading inner loop, we can now have three different numbers u, v, and z, which we're all adding at every step. To do this, we use THREE adc, and we have to shuffle around which high-bits correspond to which low-bits in a complex way. I'll leave you to figure this out for yourself, but here's an attempt at the inner loop.

 loop9 shr ax,1 ; restore carry mov al,fs:[bx] ; get first sample mov ah,cl ; save away current z-high into AH ; this makes AX a value we want to lookup adc edx,esi ; update v-high and u-low adc ebx,ebp ; update u-high and z-low adc ecx,z_v_inc ; update z-high and v-low mov bh,dl ; move v-high into tmap lookup register mov ch,fs:[bx] ; get second sample, save it in ch mov dh,bl ; save value of bl mov bx,ax mov al,gs:[bx] ; lookup first color value mov bl,ch mov bh,cl mov ah,gs:[bx] ; lookup second color value mov es:[di],ax ; output both pixels mov bl,dh ; restore bl from dh adc edx,esi adc ebx,ebp adc ecx,z_v_inc mov bh,dl adc ax,ax ; save carry add di,2 cmp di,last_di ; rather than having to decrement cx jne loop9
Notice that both of these loops are significantly slower than the original loop. I'm not personally aware of any generally faster way to do this sort of thing (but the code can be tweaked to be faster). The one exception is that for flat-run shading, you could precompute the entire texture with the right lighting. This would require a lot of storage, of course, but if you view it as a cache, it would let you get some reuse of information from frame to frame, since polygons tend to be lit the same from frame to frame.

Finally, here's a brief discussion of transparency. There are two ways to get transparency effects. The first one is slower, but more flexible. You use _another_ lookup table. You have to paint the texture that is transparent after you've drawn things behind it. Then, in the inner loop, you fetch the texture value (and light it) to draw. Then you fetch the pixel that's currently in that location. Lookup in a "transparency" table with those two values as indices, and write out the result. The idea is that you do this: table[new][old]. If new is a normal, opaque, color, then table[new][old] == new, for every value of old. If new is a special "color" which is supposed to be transparent, then table[new][old] == old, for every value of old. This causes old to show through. In addition, you can have translucency effects, where table[new][old] gives a mixture of the colors of old and new. This will let you do effects like the translucent ghosts in the Ultima Underworlds.

However, the above approach is extremely slow, since you have to load the value from the pixel map and do the extra table lookup. But it works for arbitrary polygons. DOOM only allows transparency on walls, not on ceilings and floors. Remember we noticed that the special thing about walls is that u is constant as you draw a column from a wall; you are walking down a column in the texture map at the same time you are drawing a column on screen. What this means is that you can use a data structure which encodes where the transparency in each column of the texture map is, and use that _outside_ the inner loop to handle transparency. For example, your data structure tells you that you have a run of 8 opaque pixels, then 3 transparent pixels, then 5 more opaque ones. You scale 8, 3, and 5 by the rate at which you're walking over the textures, and simply treat this as two seperate opaque runs.

The details of this method depend on exactly how you're doing your hidden surface removal, and since it doesn't generalize to floors&ceilings, much less to arbitrarily angled polygons, I don't think going into further detail will be very useful (I've never bothered writing such a thing, but I'm pretty sure that's all there is to it).

[size="3"]The Postman Always Rings Twice

If you're going to write to a slow 16-bit VGA card, you should try your darndest to always write 2 pixels at a time.

For texture mapping, your best bet is to build your screen in a buffer in RAM, and then copy it to the VGA all at once. You can do this in Mode 13h or in Mode X or Y, as your heart desires. You should definitely do this if you're painting pixels more than once while drawing.

If, however, you wish to get a speedup by not paying for the extra copy, you might like to write directly to the VGA card from your inner loop.

You might not think this is very interesting. If the write to the screen buffer in regular RAM is fast, how much can you gain by doing both steps at once, instead of splitting them in two?

The reason it is interesting is because the VGA, while slow to accept multiple writes, will let you continue doing processing after a single write. What this means is that if you overlap your texture mapping computation with your write to the VGA, you can as much as double your speed on a slow VGA card. For example, the fastest I can blast my slow VGA card is 45 fps. I can texture map floor-style directly to it at 30 fps. If I texture map to a memory buffer, this is still somewhat slow, more than just the difference between the 30 and 45 fps figures. Thus, my total rate if I write to an offscreen buffer drops as low as 20 fps, depending on exactly what I do in the texture map inner loop.

Ok, so, now suppose you've decided it might be a speedup to write directly to the VGA. There are two problems. First of all, if you're in mode X or Y, it's very difficult to write two bytes at a time, which is necessary for this approach to be a win. Second of all, even in mode 13h, it's difficult to write two bytes at a time when you're drawing a column of pixels.

I have no answer here. I expect people to stick to offscreen buffers, or to simply process columns at a time and write (at excruciatingly slow rates on some cards) to the VGA only one byte at a time.

One option is to set up a page flipping mode 13h (which is possible on some VGA cards), and to paint two independent but adjacent columns at the same time, so that you can write a word at a time. I have a very simple demo that does the latter, but it's not for the faint of heart, and I don't think it's a win once you have a lot of small polygons.

Another answer is to have a DOOM-style "low-detail" mode which computes one pixel, duplicates it, and always writes both pixels at the same time.

A final answer is just to ignore the market of people with slow VGA cards. I wouldn't be surprised if this approach was commonplace in a year or two. But if you do so with commercial software, please put a notice of this requirement on the box.

[size="3"]Mipmapping (or is it Mip-Mapping?)

Mipmapping is a very straightforward technique that can be used to significantly improve the quality of your textures, so much so that textures that you could not otherwise use because they look ugly become usable.

The problem that mipmapping addresses is as follows. When a texture is far in the distance, such that its on-screen size in pixels is significantly smaller than its actual size as a texture, only a small number of pixels will actually be visible. If the texture contains areas with lots of rapidly varying high contrast data, the texture may look ugly, and, most importantly, moire artifacts will occur. (To see this in DOOM, try shrinking the screen to the smallest setting and going outside in shareware DOOM. Many of the buildings will show moire patterns. In registered DOOM, there is a black-and-blue ceiling pattern which has very bad artifacts if it is brightly lit. Go to the mission with the gigantic round acid pool near the beginning. Cheat to get light amplification goggles (or maybe invulnerability), and you'll see it.)

Mipmapping reduces these artifacts by precomputing some "anti-aliased" textures and using them when the textures are in the distance.

The basic idea is to substitute a texture map half as big when the polygon is so small that only every other pixel is being drawn anyway. This texture map contains one pixel for every 2x2 square in the original, and is the color average of those pixels.

For a 64x64 texture map, you'd have the original map, a 32x32 map, a 16x16 map, an 8x8 map, etc.

The mipmaps will smear out colors and lose details. You can best test them by forcing them to be displayed while they're still close to you; once they appear to be working, set them up as described above.

Mipmapping causes a somewhat ugly effect when you see the textures switch from one mipmap to the next. However, especially for some textures, it is far less ugly than the effect you would get without them.

For example, a fine white-and-black checkerboard pattern (perhaps with some overlaid text) would look very ugly without mipmapping,
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