What is the Difference Between Clipping and Culling?
🆚 Go to Comparative Table 🆚Clipping and culling are both computer graphics techniques used to improve efficiency and realism in rendering graphics. Although they both involve removing parts of a scene that are not visible, their approaches and results differ.
Clipping:
- Clipping is a basic technique for removing objects, polygons, or fragments that are outside the viewing frustum or viewport.
- It is used to save time and remove unnecessary entries from the graphics.
- Clipping modifies the fragments and polygon shapes to fit within the view frustum and doesn't modify the geometry; it simply removes it from the rendering process.
- Clipping is used when objects are partially visible.
Culling:
- Culling is the process of removing objects and primitives that cannot possibly be visible.
- It is mainly used for removing a hidden surface in the graphics processor.
- Culling discards geometry that's not visible from the camera to save processing time.
- Culling is usually done by the application and is done just before transformation and lighting.
In summary, clipping is used to remove parts of objects that extend past the camera view, while culling is used to discard invisible objects or surfaces to save processing time. Both techniques are crucial in computer graphics, as they help improve rendering efficiency and visual quality.
Comparative Table: Clipping vs Culling
The main difference between clipping and culling is that clipping involves discarding objects that fall outside the frame or clipping window, whereas culling involves discarding objects that are not essential within the frame. Here is a table summarizing the differences between clipping and culling:
| Clipping | Culling |
|---|---|
| Removes geometry outside the viewing frustum or viewport | Removes objects or parts of objects that are not visible to the camera |
| Does not modify the geometry; simply removes it from the rendering process | Modifies the geometry to save processing time |
| Selective process type | Eliminative process type |
| Used to save time and increase rendering rate | Used to improve performance by reducing the number of objects that need to be rendered |
| Occurs during the rendering process in the graphics pipeline | Can be done at different pipeline stages, such as scene graph traversal, rendering, or post-processing |
In summary, clipping is used to remove parts of the scene that are not visible, while culling is used to discard objects or parts of objects that are not essential within the frame. Both techniques help improve the efficiency and realism of computer graphics, but they serve different purposes and are applied at different stages of the rendering process.
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