Adaptive NURBS Tessellation on GPU

This chapter presents a method for adaptively tessellating NURBS surfaces on GPU. The method involves tessellation interval estimation, conversion from NURBS to rational Bezier patches, and gap-free tessellation of rational Bezier patches. All the computations are performed on GPU. The main contributions of the chapter lie in two aspects: (1) we improve Zheng and Sederberg’s tessellation interval estimation for rational curves and surfaces to give larger tessellation interval and thus to produce fewer triangles, and (2) we propose an adaptive tessellation strategy that allows to tessellate each rational Bezier patch on GPU independently and meanwhile avoid gaps between rational Bezier patches. By using GPU, complicated NURBS models can be easily rendered in real time.

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