How does face culling work? Why doesn it use the surface normal?
OpenGL face culling calculates the signed area of the filled primitive in window coordinate space. The signed area is positive when the window coordinates are in a counter-clockwise order and negative when clockwise. An app can use glFrontFace() to specify the ordering, counter-clockwise or clockwise, to be interpreted as a front-facing or back-facing primitive. An application can specify culling either front or back faces by calling glCullFace(). Finally, face culling must be enabled with a call to glEnable(GL_CULL_FACE); . OpenGL uses your primitive’s window space projection to determine face culling for two reasons. To create interesting lighting effects, it’s often desirable to specify normals that aren’t orthogonal to the surface being approximated. If these normals were used for face culling, it might cause some primitives to be culled erroneously. Also, a dot-product culling scheme could require a matrix inversion, which isn’t always possible (i.e., in the case where the matrix
