Patents by Inventor James Frederick Blinn

James Frederick Blinn has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Patent number: 7564459
    Abstract: A shape defined partially be a Bézier curve is rendered through a GPU-implemented technique which determines for various screen points which side of the curve the points lie on. This is done in the particular case of cubic Bézier curves for shapes defined by the Bézier control points of the curves. The type of the curve is identified through an analysis of an inflection point polynomial based on the curve. The curve is then projected to a canonical implicit form in a canonical texture space, allowing computation to be efficiently performed on a simple canonical form of the curve.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 31, 2005
    Date of Patent: July 21, 2009
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Charles T. Loop, James Frederick Blinn
  • Patent number: 7466314
    Abstract: Surfaces defined by a Bézier tetrahedron, and in particular quadric surfaces, are rendered on programmable graphics hardware. Pixels are rendered through triangular sides of the tetrahedra and locations on the shapes, as well as surface normals for lighting evaluations, are computed using pixel shader computations. Additionally, vertex shaders are used to aid interpolation over a small number of values as input to the pixel shaders. Through this, rendering of the surfaces is performed independently of viewing resolution, allowing for advanced level-of-detail management. By individually rendering tetrahedrally-defined surfaces which together form complex shapes, the complex shapes can be rendered in their entirety.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 27, 2005
    Date of Patent: December 16, 2008
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Charles T. Loop, James Frederick Blinn