Quadratic Bezier triangles as drawing primitives

Abstract

We propose to use quadratic Bezier triangles as additional drawing primitives: quadratic Bezier triangles require much less model data for faithful representation of curved surfaces than planar triangles. Therefore, they require less storage and/or transmission capacity. Furthermore, they allow automatic level-of-detail. Finally, they result in considerable savings in model-view transformations and lighting calculations. We present two algorithms for rendering these triangles, each of which can be easily incorporated in hardware render systems currently used for planar triangles.

Watertight tessellation using forward differencing

“…Bruijns [2] uses forward differencing to adaptively tessellate quadratic Bézier patches. Regular interior meshes are heuristically stitched to an independently sampled perimeter.…”