How Scanline based 2d rendering engines works?

Question

Will you please provide me a reference to help me understand how scanline based rendering engines works? I want to implement a 2D rendering engine which can support region-based clipping, basic shape drawing and filling with anti aliasing, and basic transformations (Perspective, Rotation, Scaling). I need algorithms which give priority to performance rather than quality because I want to implement it for embedded systems with no fpu.

Answer 1

I'm not sure about the rest, but I can help you with fast scaling and 2D rotation for ARM (written in assembly language). Check out a demo:

http://www.modaco.com/content/smartphone-software-games/291993/bbgfx-2d-graphics-library-beta/

L.B.

Answer 2

Here is a good series of articles by Chris Hecker that covers software rasterization:

http://chrishecker.com/Miscellaneous_Technical_Articles

And here is a site that talks about and includes code for a software rasterizer. It was written for a system that does not have an FPU (the GP2X) and includes source for a fixed point math library.

http://www.trenki.net

Answer 3

I'm probably showing my age, but I still love my copy of Foley, Feiner, van Dam, and Hughes (The White Book).

Jim Blinn had a great column that's available as a book called Jim Blinn's Corner: A Trip Down the Graphics Pipeline.

Both of these are quited dated now, and aside from the principles of 3D geometry, they're not very useful for programming today's powerful pixel pushers.

OTOH, they're probably just perfect for an embedded environment with no GPU or FPU!