# VkFrontFace(3) Manual Page

## Name

VkFrontFace - Interpret polygon front-facing orientation

## C Specification

The first step of polygon rasterization is to determine whether the triangle is back-facing or front-facing. This determination is made based on the sign of the (clipped or unclipped) polygon’s area computed in framebuffer coordinates. One way to compute this area is:

\[a = -{1 \over 2}\sum_{i=0}^{n-1} x_f^i y_f^{i \oplus 1} - x_f^{i \oplus 1} y_f^i\]

where \(x_f^i\) and \(y_f^i\) are the x and y framebuffer coordinates of the ith vertex of the n-vertex polygon (vertices are numbered starting at zero for the purposes of this computation) and i ⊕ 1 is (i + 1) mod n.

The interpretation of the sign of a is determined by the VkPipelineRasterizationStateCreateInfo::`frontFace` property of the currently active pipeline. Possible values are:

    typedef enum VkFrontFace {
        VK_FRONT_FACE_COUNTER_CLOCKWISE = 0,
        VK_FRONT_FACE_CLOCKWISE = 1,
        VK_FRONT_FACE_MAX_ENUM = 0x7FFFFFFF
    } VkFrontFace;

## Description

- `VK_FRONT_FACE_COUNTER_CLOCKWISE` specifies that a triangle with positive area is considered front-facing.

- `VK_FRONT_FACE_CLOCKWISE` specifies that a triangle with negative area is considered front-facing.

Any triangle which is not front-facing is back-facing, including zero-area triangles.

## See Also

VkPipelineRasterizationStateCreateInfo

## Document Notes

For more information, see the Vulkan Specification

This page is extracted from the Vulkan Specification. Fixes and changes should be made to the Specification, not directly.

## Copyright

Copyright (c) 2014-2020 Khronos Group. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.