Analytic Visibility on the GPU

Thomas Auzinger, Michael Wimmer, Stefan Jeschke
Analytic Visibility on the GPU
Computer Graphics Forum (Proceeding of EUROGRAPHICS 2013), (), May 2013. [ paper]
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Abstract

This paper presents a parallel, implementation-friendly analytic visibility method for triangular meshes. Together with an analytic filter convolution, it allows for a fully analytic solution to anti-aliased 3D mesh rendering on parallel hardware. Building on recent works in computational geometry, we present a new edge-triangle intersection algorithm and a novel method to complete the boundaries of all visible triangle regions after a hidden line elimination step. All stages of the method are embarrassingly parallel and easily implementable on parallel hardware. A GPU implementation is discussed and performance characteristics of the method are shown and compared to traditional sampling-based rendering methods.

Additional Files and Images

Additional images and videos:
Overview of the algorithm Overview of the algorithm: The 3D scene is projected onto the image plane (1) and visibility is resolved in this 2.5D space (2). A new edge-triangle intersection algorithm (3) enables us to extend hidden line elimination (4) to full hidden surface elimination by the use of a novel boundary completion method (5).
Spikes model Spikes model: Analytic rendering of pyramidal spikes. This serves as a stress test of the analytic visibility algorithm and even for high depth complexity and small geometric details the scene visibility is robustly and correctly resolved.
Zoneplates model Zoneplates model: Analytic rendering of two overlapping zone plates. Visibility of small geometric details is correctly resolved and excellent anti-aliasing up to numeric precision achieved.
Additional files:
Fast forward Fast forward: Fast forward video (Techsmith Screen Capture Codec)(56MB)
paper paper: Full paper preprint

BibTeX

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@article{Auzinger_2013_AnaVis,
  title =      "Analytic Visibility on the GPU",
  author =     "Thomas Auzinger and Michael Wimmer and Stefan Jeschke",
  year =       "2013",
  abstract =   "This paper presents a parallel, implementation-friendly
               analytic visibility method for triangular meshes. Together
               with an analytic filter convolution, it allows for a fully
               analytic solution to anti-aliased 3D mesh rendering on
               parallel hardware. Building on recent works in computational
               geometry, we present a new edge-triangle intersection
               algorithm and a novel method to complete the boundaries of
               all visible triangle regions after a hidden line elimination
               step. All stages of the method are embarrassingly parallel
               and easily implementable on parallel hardware. A GPU
               implementation is discussed and performance characteristics
               of the method are shown and compared to traditional
               sampling-based rendering methods.",
  pages =      "%pages_from%--%pages_to%",
  month =      may,
  event =      "Eurographics 2013",
  journal =    "Computer Graphics Forum (Proceeding of EUROGRAPHICS 2013)",
  location =   "Girona",
  keywords =   "GPGPU, hidden surface elimination, hidden surface removal,
               close-form, visibility, analytic, rendering, filter,
               anti-aliasing, SIMD, GPU",
  URL =        "http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2013/Auzinger_2013_AnaVis/",
}