## 21.6. Isoline Tessellation

If the tessellation primitive mode is `IsoLines`, a set of independent horizontal line segments is drawn. The segments are arranged into connected strips called isolines, where the vertices of each isoline have a constant v coordinate and u coordinates covering the full range [0,1]. The number of isolines generated is derived from the first outer tessellation level; the number of segments in each isoline is derived from the second outer tessellation level. Both inner tessellation levels and the third and fourth outer tessellation levels have no effect in this mode.

As with quad tessellation above, isoline tessellation begins with a rectangle. The u = 0 and u = 1 edges of the rectangle are subdivided according to the first outer tessellation level. For the purposes of this subdivision, the tessellation spacing mode is ignored and treated as equal_spacing. An isoline is drawn connecting each vertex on the u = 0 rectangle edge to the corresponding vertex on the u = 1 rectangle edge, except that no line is drawn between (0,1) and (1,1). If the number of isolines on the subdivided u = 0 and u = 1 edges is n, this process will result in n equally spaced lines with constant v coordinates of 0, $\frac{1}{n}, \frac{2}{n}, \ldots, \frac{n-1}{n}$ .

Each of the n isolines is then subdivided according to the second outer tessellation level and the tessellation spacing, resulting in m line segments. Each segment of each line is emitted by the tessellator.

The order in which the generated line segments are passed to subsequent pipeline stages and the order of the vertices in each generated line segment are both implementation-dependent.