Fast visualization of complex 3D models using displacement mapping
T. Lu · 2010
Displaying 3D models with high detail surface at an interactive speed has long been a topic of interest in Computer Graphics research.However, most high detail 3D models acquired from 3D Laser scanning devices often contain large number of points (or 3D vertices).Currently, the number of points can even reach into the billion, an example being the non-simplified 3D scanning model of Michaelangelo's David from Stanford scanning repository [1].Unfortunately, current hardware is still not capable of visualizing such vast amount of data directly.Thus, much effort has been focused on different methods of pre-processing such data in order to enable it to be rendered more efficiently in modern Computer Graphics hardware, e.g.GPUs.However, most current techniques, for example 3D mesh simplification are not efficient enough, requiring a significant amount of pre-processing time.Having observed these problems, in this thesis, a simple and efficient method is presented for rendering high-detail 3D models at interactive rates using a real-time displacement mapping technique.The method first uses an octree to decompose a 3D model into a set of height fields which are contained in octree cells, and then displays the model by height fields ray-casting method.Furthermore, simply rasterizing the faces of the octree voxels to produce fragments for ray-casting on the GPU, together with straightforward transformation of view rays to the displacement map's local space, the method is able to accurately render the object's silhouettes with very little special handling.