Mark S Peercy

6384824, May 7, 2002

Aug 20, 1999

09/377778

David L. Morgan - Mountain View CA
Mark S. Peercy - Sunnyvale CA

Microsoft Corporation - Redmond WA

G06T 1560

345426

A method, system, and computer program product are provided for multi-pass bump-mapping into an environment map. At least two passes are made through a hardware rasterizer to bump map into an environment map. In the first pass, a lighting equation is overloaded. The overloaded lighting equation represents a reflection vector of a perturbed normal at a pixel position. The reflection vector at a pixel position is then generated according to the overloaded lighting equation. In a second pass, at least one texel in an environment map is accessed based on the generated reflection vector. For example, the generated reflection vector can be used as a look-up into the environment map to access one or more texel samples. In one example implementation, a lighting equation includes a specular material vector Sm, a lighting vector L, and an ambient material vector Am. Such a lighting equation is overloaded by setting the specular material vector Sm to equal a perturbed normal vector Nâ, setting the lighting vector L to equal a viewing vector V at the pixel position, and setting an ambient material vector Am to equal the viewing vector V.

6578197, Jun 10, 2003

Apr 8, 1998

09/056683

Mark Peercy - Sunnyvale CA
John M. Airey - Mountain View CA
Jonathan Brandt - Santa Cruz CA

Silicon Graphics, Inc. - Mountain View CA

G06F 945

717143, 717140, 717141, 717142, 717144

A system and method for high-speed execution of graphics application programs, including shading language instructions, that utilize 3D graphics hardware. The method involves expressing a graphics computation in a platform-independent procedural shading expression, converting the expression (i. e. , user application program) into an intermediate representation such as a tree, and then translating it into a sequence of parametric shading expressions. The method can alternatively processes the intermediate tree representation using a cost-based, tree-grammar recognizer such as iburg. The result is a platform-specific and least-cost, in terms of the underlying hardware, sequence of parametric shading expressions that realizes the graphics computation. The system and method is useful in translating platform-independent RenderManâ Shading Language programs into fast-executing, platform-specific OpenGLâ or Direct3Dâ executable code.

6587114, Jul 1, 2003

Dec 15, 1999

09/461345

Mark S. Peercy - Cupertino CA
Daniel D. Loh - Fremont CA

Microsoft Corporation - Redmond WA

G09G 500

345582

The present invention provides a method, system, and computer program product for generating a digital image having spatially varying effects. A preexisting source image is selected and used to generate a three-dimensional texture volume by convolving the pixels of the selected source image with a predetermined convolution kernel. A display image having spatially varying effects is then generated using the pixels of the three-dimensional texture volume and the pixels of a reference image, where each pixel of the reference image acts as an index to the pixels of the three-dimensional texture volume. The display image may be generated by either copying pixels from the three-dimensional texture volume to a frame buffer or by blending pixels from the three-dimensional texture volume with the pixels of an image already stored in the frame buffer.

6650327, Nov 18, 2003

Jun 16, 1998

09/098041

John M. Airey - Moutain View CA
Mark S. Peercy - Sunnyvale CA
Robert A. Drebin - Palo Alto CA
John Montrym - Los Altos CA
David L. Dignam - Belmont CA
Christopher J. Migdal - Mountain View CA
Danny D. Loh - Fremont CA

Silicon Graphics, Inc. - Mountain View CA

G06T 5391

345431, 345422, 36518905

A floating point rasterization and frame buffer in a computer system graphics program. The rasterization, fog, lighting, texturing, blending, and antialiasing processes operate on floating point values. In one embodiment, a 16-bit floating point format consisting of one sign bit, ten mantissa bits, and five exponent bits (s10e5), is used to optimize the range and precision afforded by the 16 available bits of information. In other embodiments, the floating point format can be defined in the manner preferred in order to achieve a desired range and precision of the data stored in the frame buffer. The final floating point values corresponding to pixel attributes are stored in a frame buffer and eventually read and drawn for display. The graphics program can operate directly on the data in the frame buffer without losing any of the desired range and precision of the data.

6707462, Mar 16, 2004

May 12, 2000

09/569649

Mark S. Peercy - Cupertino CA
Thomas M. Olano - San Francisco CA
John M. Airey - Mountain View CA

Microsoft Corporation - Redmond WA

G09G 500

345619, 345418

One aspect of the invention is a method for implementing a graphics control construct. The method includes the step of assigning by a graphics system interface ( ) a value to at least one bit in a stencil buffer (S) in response to a first condition of a first conditional clause in an application program ( ). The method also includes the steps of selecting at least a first portion of image data in response to the value, and processing the selected first portion of image data in a frame buffer ( ) of a graphics pipeline ( ).

6731289, May 4, 2004

May 12, 2000

09/569654

Mark S. Peercy - Cupertino CA
John M. Airey - Mountain View CA
Andrew D. Bowen - San Jose CA

Microsoft Corporation - Redmond WA

G06F 1516

345503, 345 31, 345 5, 345520

One aspect of the invention is a method for displaying extended range pixel values. The method includes the step of receiving a plurality of image pixel values each with at least one associated data value. The method also includes the steps of sending at least one of the plurality of image pixel values to a first display device ( ) having a maximum display value; and sending at least one of the plurality of image pixel values exceeding maximum display value to a second display device ( ). In a further embodiment, the at least one associated data value may be at least one of the group consisting of a pixel intensity, a color, and a location of the pixel value.

6747660, Jun 8, 2004

May 12, 2000

09/569521

Thomas M. Olano - San Francisco CA
Mark S. Peercy - Cupertino CA

Microsoft Corporation - Redmond WA

G09G 500

345582, 345589, 345506, 345601

One aspect of the invention is a method for accelerating noise. The method includes the step of creating a plurality noise texture values (n ,. . . , n ) each corresponding to one of a plurality of image pixel values (x ,. . . , x ). The method also includes invoking at least a portion of a graphics pipeline ( ) to blend each of the plurality of image pixel values (x ,. . . , x ) with one of the plurality of noise texture values (n ,. . . , n ).

6933941, Aug 23, 2005

Apr 10, 2001

09/832138

Mark S. Peercy - Cupertino CA, US
David Blythe - San Carlos CA, US
Bradley A. Grantham - Palo Alto CA, US
P. Jeffrey Ungar - Mountain View CA, US

Microsoft Corporation - Redmond WA

G06T017/00

345428, 345426, 345440, 345420, 345506, 345543

One aspect of the invention is a method for representing a scene (S). The method includes providing a higher-level appearance description of an appearance of geometry in a retained-mode representation (). The method also includes traversing the retained-mode representation () to provide a final representation () that can be rendered by a graphics pipeline ().