Splatting Illuminated Ellipsoids with Depth Correction

Ellipsoids are important primitives used in visualization and modeling, where often a larger number of ellipsoids have to be displayed in real-time. The standard approach of tessellating each ellipsoid into a smooth polygonal mesh leads to unacceptable polygon counts that dramatically increase the rendering time. In this paper a method is proposed to splat ellipsoids perspectively correct. The splatted ellipsoids are illuminated with the accuracy of floating point precision by exploiting the fragment shader facility of current graphics accelerators. It is also shown how to correct the depth value of the fragment position such that overlapping ellipsoids are displayed correctly.