Research project

Realtime Rendering of Parametric Surfaces

Parametric Surfaces, e.g. Bezier surfaces, have a solid mathematical foundation and are used in many areas. However the optimal way of rendering those is not immediately obvious.
Raytracing the surface directly has to deal with numerical instabilities, especially near silhouettes. Therefore most applications tesselate the surface into a triangle mesh. This usually implies a compromise between quality and speed/memory consumption.
An interesting approach is the REYES algorithm, which tesselates the parametric surface for each frame. It aims to generate triangles such that each triangle has an area of approximately one pixel on screen.
This provides a sampling of the geometry, that is close to perfect; However it is computationally very expensive. It is the goal of this project to develop an algorithm similar to REYES that works on modern GPUs to bring the qualitative advantages to real-time applications.

Project manager:
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Matthias Nießner

Project participants:
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Quirin Meyer, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Marc Stamminger, Loop, Charles, Dr.-Ing. Christian Eisenacher

Keywords:
Rendering, Real-Time, Surface, Adaptive, Quality

Duration: 20.7.2008 - 31.12.2015

Mitwirkende Institutionen:
Microsoft Research

Contact:
Nießner, Matthias
E-Mail: Matthias.Niessner@informatik.uni-erlangen.de

Publications

Eisenacher, Christian ; Meyer, Quirin ; Loop, Charles: Real-Time View-Dependent Rendering of Parametric Surfaces. In: Haines, Eric ; McGuire, Morgan ; Aliaga, Daniel G. ; Oliveira, Manuel (Ed.) : I3D '09: Proceedings of the 2009 symposium on Interactive 3D graphics and games. New York : ACM Press, 2009, pp 137-143. - ISBN 978-1-60558-429-4

Eisenacher, Christian ; Loop, Charles: Data-parallel Micropolygon Rasterization. In: Seipel, Stefan ; Lensch, Hendrik (Ed.) : Eurographics 2010 Annex: Short Papers (Eurographics 2010 Norrköping 03.05.2010 - 07.05.2010). 2010, pp 53-56.

Loop, Charles ; Eisenacher, Christian: Real-time Patch-Based Sort-Middle Rendering on Massively Parallel Hardware. Redmond : Microsoft Research. 2009 (MSR-TR-2009-83). - Research report. 21 pages

Nießner, Matthias ; Loop, Charles ; Meyer, Mark ; DeRose, Tony: Feature Adaptive GPU Rendering of Catmull-Clark Subdivision Surfaces. In: ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) (2012), No. 6, pp 1-11

Loop, Charles ; Eisenacher, Christian ; Meyer, Quirin: VIEW-DEPENDENT RENDERING OF PARAMETRIC SURFACES. Schutzrecht US20100259540A1 laid open patent application (14.10.2010)

Nießner, Matthias ; Loop, Charles ; Greiner, Günther: Efficient Evaluation of Semi-Smooth Creases in Catmull-Clark Subdivision Surfaces. In: - (Ed.) : Eurographics 2012 Annex: Short Papers (Eurographics 2012 Cagliary). 2012, pp 41-44.

Nießner, Matthias ; Loop, Charles: Analytic Displacement Mapping using Hardware Tessellation. In: ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 32 (2013), No. 3, pp 26

Nießner, Matthias: Rendering Subdivision Surfaces using Hardware Tessellation. München : Verlag Dr. Hut, 2013. - ISBN 978-3-8439-1182-5

Schäfer, Henry ; Raab, Jens ; Keinert, Benjamin ; Meyer, Mark ; Stamminger, Marc ; Nießner, Matthias: Dynamic Feature-Adaptive Subdivision. In: ACM (Ed.) : Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games 2015 (ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games 2015). New York, NY : ACM, 2015, pp to appear.

Schäfer, Henry ; Nießner, Matthias ; Keinert, Benjamin ; Stamminger, Marc ; Loop, Charles: State of the Art Report on Real-time Rendering with Hardware Tessellation. In: Eurographics Association (Org.) : State of the Art Reports (Eurographics Strassburg 5.4.-9.4.2014). 2014, pp 93-117.