Surfels: surface elements as rendering primitives

Surface elements (surfels) are a powerful paradigm to efficiently render complex geometric objects at interactive frame rates. Unlike classical surface discretizations, i.e., triangles or quadrilateral meshes, surfels are point primitives without explicit connectivity. Surfel attributes comprise depth, texture color, normal, and others. As a pre-process, an octree-based surfel representation of a geometric object is computed. During sampling, surfel positions and normals are optionally perturbed, and different levels of texture colors are prefiltered and stored per surfel. During rendering, a hierarchical forward warping algorithm projects surfels to a z-buffer. A novel method called visibility splatting determines visible surfels and holes in the z-buffer. Visible surfels are shaded using texture filtering, Phong illumination, and environment mapping using per-surfel normals. Several methods of image reconstruction, including supersampling, offer flexible speed-quality tradeoffs. Due to the simplicity of the operations, the surfel rendering pipeline is amenable for hardware implementation. Surfel objects offer complex shape, low rendering cost and high image quality, which makes them specifically suited for low-cost, real-time graphics, such as games.

[1]  Edwin Earl Catmull,et al.  A subdivision algorithm for computer display of curved surfaces. , 1974 .

[2]  W. Reeves.  Particle Systems—a Technique for Modeling a Class of Fuzzy Objects , 1983, TOGS.

[3]  Loren C. Carpenter,et al.  The A -buffer, an antialiased hidden surface method , 1984, SIGGRAPH.

[4]  Paul S. Heckbert,et al.  Survey of Texture Mapping , 1986, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

[5]  Paul S. Heckbert,et al.  Fundamentals of Texture Mapping and Image Warping , 1989 .

[6]  Lee Westover,et al.  Footprint evaluation for volume rendering , 1990, SIGGRAPH.

[7]  Gabor T. Herman,et al.  Discrete multidimensional Jordan surfaces , 1992, CVGIP Graph. Model. Image Process..

[8]  Michael F. Deering.  Data complexity for virtual reality: where do all the triangles go? , 1993, Proceedings of IEEE Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium.

[9]  Daniel Cohen-Or,et al.  Volume graphics , 1993, Computer.

[10]  Douglas Voorhies,et al.  Reflection vector shading hardware , 1994, SIGGRAPH.

[11]  David S. Ebert,et al.  Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural Approach , 1994 .

[12]  Los Angeles, CA , 1995, International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery.

[13]  Leonard McMillan,et al.  Plenoptic Modeling: An Image-Based Rendering System , 2023 .

[14]  Shenchang Eric Chen,et al.  QuickTime VR: an image-based approach to virtual environment navigation , 1995, SIGGRAPH.

[15]  Jay Torborg,et al.  Talisman: commodity realtime 3D graphics for the PC , 1996, SIGGRAPH.

[16]  Richard Szeliski,et al.  The lumigraph , 1996, SIGGRAPH.

[17]  Nelson L. Max,et al.  Hierarchical Rendering of Trees from Precomputed Multi-Layer Z-Buffers , 1996, Rendering Techniques.

[18]  Marc Levoy,et al.  Light field rendering , 1996, SIGGRAPH.

[19]  Henry Fuchs,et al.  The Delta Tree: An Object-Centered Approach to Image-Based Rendering , 1996 .

[20]  Gernot Schaufler.  Per-Object Image Warping with Layered Impostors , 1998, Rendering Techniques.

[21]  William J. Dally,et al.  Point Sample Rendering , 1998, Rendering Techniques.

[22]  Richard Szeliski,et al.  Layered depth images , 1998, SIGGRAPH.

[23]  Dani Lischinski,et al.  Image-Based Rendering for Non-Diffuse Synthetic Scenes , 1998, Rendering Techniques.

[24]  Anselmo Lastra,et al.  LDI tree: a hierarchical representation for image-based rendering , 1999, SIGGRAPH.

[25]  Voicu Popescu,et al.  High Quality 3D Image Warping by Separating Visibility from Reconstruction , 1999 .

[26]  Marc Levoy,et al.  The Use of Points as a Display Primitive , 2000 .