Real‐Time Rendering Techniques with Hardware Tessellation

Abstract

Graphics hardware has progressively been optimized to render more triangles with increasingly flexible shading. For highly detailed geometry, interactive applications restricted themselves to performing transforms on fixed geometry, since they could not incur the cost required to generate and transfer smooth or displaced geometry to the GPU at render time. As a result of recent advances in graphics hardware, in particular the GPU tessellation unit, complex geometry can now be generated on the fly within the GPU's rendering pipeline. This has enabled the generation and displacement of smooth parametric surfaces in real-time applications. However, many well-established approaches in offline rendering are not directly transferable due to the limited tessellation patterns or the parallel execution model of the tessellation stage. In this survey, we provide an overview of recent work and challenges in this topic by summarizing, discussing, and comparing methods for the rendering of smooth and highly detailed surfaces in real time.

A Multilevel Terrain Rendering Method Based on Dynamic Stitching Strips

“…During the tessellation stage, a coarse input patch can be subdivided into many smaller primitives on the fly, which is very efficient and can save much memory [58]. This property is very suitable for displacement mapping with height maps [59], and an increasing number of researchers are focusing on how to apply GPU tessellation to terrain rendering. Fernandes and Oliveira [60] broke the planar input mesh into subpatches with equal size to obtain a terrain model with variable densities.…”

Water surface wavelets

“…To take advantage of this disparity, we compute A on coarse grids, and we compute η on a viewer-dependent adaptivelyrefined detailed mesh. Specifically, our GPU-optimized version uses hardware tesselation [Nießner et al 2016] to compute an adaptive triangle mesh with vertex positions determined by η, and it computes the surface normals in a pixel shader using the analytic spatial derivatives of η.…”

Hierarchical Functional Maps between Subdivision Surfaces

“…If the model is to be used in a low‐resource environment, such as a game or an augmented‐reality application, the geometric details are then “baked” into an image, and only the low resolution geometry is used at runtime. The details are rendered as normal maps or bump maps, and more recently, by using hardware tessellation, as displacement maps [NKF*16].…”