Abstract: Real-time video information is digitized and stored as a plurality of digital pixels in a memory. A 3D surface is then constructed from a flat source surface by breaking the surface into a plurality of flat polygonal patches and folding, rotating and manipulating the patches in three dimensions. The constructed object can then be manipulated as an object in three dimensions. During patch and object manipulation, the special effects system keeps track of the patch vertex locations. After the object has been created and located, real-time video is painted on the object surface by using the patch vertex locations to retrieve selected source pixels from the memory and to construct a value for each pixel on the object surface from the selected source pixels.

Abstract: A patch-driven video 3D special effects system constructs an output display of a desired three-dimensional shape with real-time video picture information displayed on the surface of the shape by dividing a video source plane into a plurality of polygonal patches and manipulating said patches in three dimensions to create the shape. The special effects system is controlled by a keyframing control system in which a small number of selected parameters are used to define several general purpose 3D shapes. These parameters are then specified in each keyframe. By varying the selected parameters, the general purpose object can be reshaped into a number of familiar shapes such as cubes, cones, etc. A pre-defined program converts the selected parameters into patch shapes and vertice positions which are used by the video special effects hardware to actually create the images.