C Specification

The first step of polygon rasterization is to determine whether the triangle is back-facing or front-facing. This determination is made based on the sign of the (clipped or unclipped) polygon’s area computed in framebuffer coordinates. One way to compute this area is:

where and are the x and y framebuffer coordinates of the ith vertex of the n-vertex polygon (vertices are numbered starting at zero for the purposes of this computation) and i ⊕ 1 is (i + 1) mod n.

The interpretation of the sign of a is determined by the VkPipelineRasterizationStateCreateInfo::frontFace property of the currently active pipeline. Possible values are:

// Provided by VK_VERSION_1_0
typedef enum VkFrontFace {
    VK_FRONT_FACE_COUNTER_CLOCKWISE = 0,
    VK_FRONT_FACE_CLOCKWISE = 1,
} VkFrontFace;

Description

  • VK_FRONT_FACE_COUNTER_CLOCKWISE specifies that a triangle with positive area is considered front-facing.

  • VK_FRONT_FACE_CLOCKWISE specifies that a triangle with negative area is considered front-facing.

Any triangle which is not front-facing is back-facing, including zero-area triangles.

See Also

VK_VERSION_1_0, VkPipelineRasterizationStateCreateInfo, vkCmdSetFrontFace, vkCmdSetFrontFaceEXT

Document Notes

For more information, see the Vulkan Specification

This page is extracted from the Vulkan Specification. Fixes and changes should be made to the Specification, not directly.

Copyright

Copyright 2014-2024 The Khronos Group Inc.

SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0