Thick Surfaces: Interactive Modeling of Topologically Complex Geometric Details

Lots of objects in computer graphics applications are represented by surfaces. It works very well for objects of simple topology, but can get prohibitively expensive for objects with complex small-scale geometrical details. Volumetric textures aligned with a surface can be used to add topologically complex geometric details to an object, while retaining an underlying simple surface structure. The simple surface structure provides great controllability on the overall shape of the model, and volumetric textures handle geometric details and topological changes efficiently. Adding a volumetric texture to a surface requires more than a conventional two-dimensional parameterization: a part of the space surrounding the surface has to be parameterized. Another problem with using volumetric textures for adding geometric detail is the difficulty of the rendering of implicitly represented surfaces, especially when they are changed interactively. We introduce thick surfaces to represent objects with topologically complex geometric details. A thick surface consists of three components. First, a base mesh of simple structure is used to approximate the overall shape of the object. Second, a layer of space along the base mesh is parameterized. We define the layer of space as a shell, which covers the geometric details of the object. Third, volumetric textures of geometric details are mapped into the shell. The object is represented as the implicit surface encoded by the volumetric textures. Places without volumetric textures are filled with patches of the base mesh. We present algorithms for constructing a shell around a surface and rendering a volumetric-textured surface. Mipmap technique for volumetric textures is explored as well. The gradient field of a generalized distance function is used to construct a non-self-intersecting shell, which has other properties desirable for volumetric texture mapping. The rendering algorithm is designed and implemented on NVIDIA GeForceFX video chips. Finally we demonstrate a number of interactive operations that these algorithms enable.

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