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Filled vectors

Programming På svenska → Updated: 2026-10-04

The scene's name for rotating 3D objects with solid-coloured faces — the first real 3D in home computer demos.

Before filled vectors there were wireframes and vector balls. Filling polygons means working out the edges and writing every pixel between them, which on a 7 MHz CPU was enough for a handful of faces per frame. Visible faces are picked by discarding the ones turned away from the viewer, and each face gets a single colour based on its angle to the light.

The Amiga had a shortcut: the blitter could draw the edge lines and then fill between them in a single pass per bitplane while the CPU got on with the next frame. That made filled vectors an Amiga speciality around 1989–1991, with the glenz vector as their translucent upper class. Gouraud shading was the next step, once machines could keep up.

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