Continuous Shading of Curved Surfaces

Abstract

A procedure for computing shaded pictures of curved surfaces is presented. The surface is approximated by small polygons in order to solve easily the hidden-parts problem, but the shading of each polygon is computed so that discontinuities of shade are eliminated across the surface and a smooth appearance is obtained. In order to achieve speed efficiency, the technique developed by Watkins is used which makes possible a hardware implementation of this algorithm.