Surfels: Surface Elements as Rendering Primitives

Surfels: Surface Elements as Rendering Primitives

2000 | Hanspeter Pfister, Matthias Zwicker, Jeroen van Baar, Markus Gross
Surfel rendering is a novel approach to efficiently render complex geometric objects at interactive frame rates. Unlike traditional surface discretizations, surfels are point primitives without explicit connectivity, storing depth, texture color, normal, and other attributes. The process involves precomputing an octree-based surfel representation of the object, perturbing surfel positions and normals during sampling, and prefiltering texture colors. During rendering, a hierarchical forward warping algorithm projects surfels to a z-buffer, and a visibility splatting method determines visible surfels and holes. Visible surfels are shaded using texture filtering, Phong illumination, and environment mapping. The surfel rendering pipeline is hardware-friendly and offers flexible speed-quality trade-offs, making it suitable for low-cost, real-time graphics, particularly in games. The paper discusses the conceptual overview, sampling techniques, data structure, rendering pipeline, implementation, and future extensions, highlighting its advantages in handling complex shapes and textures while maintaining high image quality.Surfel rendering is a novel approach to efficiently render complex geometric objects at interactive frame rates. Unlike traditional surface discretizations, surfels are point primitives without explicit connectivity, storing depth, texture color, normal, and other attributes. The process involves precomputing an octree-based surfel representation of the object, perturbing surfel positions and normals during sampling, and prefiltering texture colors. During rendering, a hierarchical forward warping algorithm projects surfels to a z-buffer, and a visibility splatting method determines visible surfels and holes. Visible surfels are shaded using texture filtering, Phong illumination, and environment mapping. The surfel rendering pipeline is hardware-friendly and offers flexible speed-quality trade-offs, making it suitable for low-cost, real-time graphics, particularly in games. The paper discusses the conceptual overview, sampling techniques, data structure, rendering pipeline, implementation, and future extensions, highlighting its advantages in handling complex shapes and textures while maintaining high image quality.
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