Volume Clipping

OpenGL OpenGL: Advanced Coding
1

I’m a bit confused about how OpenGL performs clipping on primitives. Does it clip at rasterization time (clips per-fragment against the viewport) or does it use clip planes and do vertex inside/outside plane test?
If 3D clipping (the later approach) is used, there will be a problem. when passing a primitive, say a triangle strip, and it’s partially clipped, a new vertices will be added. How does OpenGL take care of this?
Thanks.

2

It does the latter, clipping happens in 3d (clip space, [-1;1]^3). New verts are added internally by the driver/the hardware. You don’t have to worry about it, that’s one of the things that the GL handles automatically.

3

I’m not sure if that is the correct answer.
I believe that it works in the following way:-

  • the vertices are transformed into eye space.
  • any primitives (tris, tristrips etc.) outside the frustum are ignored (culled, if you will).
  • any primitives partially inside the frustum are transformed into clip-space (screen space).
  • the rasterizer clips to the scissor region.

It’s because you get different results interpolating a normal (you’d have to generate a new vertex AND a new normal if clipping in eye space - this would produce artifacts, as the lighting would be inconsistant with an unclipped triangle).

I think what I say is true, but I’m not 100% sure.

4

The way clipping is spec’d to work in GL is as follows, but an implementation is free to do whatever so long as it produces the correct results.

  • transform/light vertices using the modelview
  • coalesce vertices into primitives (primitive assembly)
  • clip the primitives against the eye-space user clip planes
  • transform by the projection matrix
  • clip the primitives against these contraints in clip-space
    -w <= x <= w
    -w <= y <= w
    -w <= z <= w
  • divide by w
  • apply the viewport transform
  • rasterize the primitive applying scissor

I doubt just about any implementation does this exactly, but it is definitely not uncommon for the clipping to be done on primitivesas specified rather than as a scissor operation. To get polygon clipping for polygon mode line corect, you almost need to do it that way.

  • Evan