Patent ID: 8026915

Claim:
A method of determining a value of an image sample point of a computer graphics image, the method comprising: receiving a set of geometry samples potentially visible to an image sample point, wherein each geometry sample represents at least a portion of scene geometry; selecting at least a subset of the set of geometry samples associated with at least one visibility function; for each selected geometry sample: using a processor, invoking a visibility function associated with the selected geometry sample; accessing a non-depth attribute of a different geometry sample in the set of geometry samples using the visibility function; determining a resulting occlusion of the selected geometry sample with respect to the different geometry sample using at least the non-depth attribute of the different geometry sample in the set of geometry samples; and determining a value of an image sample point of an image at least in part from the resulting occlusion of the selected geometry sample; and storing the image on a computer-readable medium in a non-transitory form, wherein the image includes the image sample point.