View-Independent Object-Space Surface Splatting
Chun‐Fa Chang, Yung-Feng Chiu, Weizhi Liao · 2005
Elliptical weighted average (EWA) surface splatting is an important technique for producing high-quality point-based rendering. With the proliferation of programmable graphics hardware, many methods have been proposed recently to implement hardware-accelerated EWA surface splatting on modern consumerlevel graphics hardware. However, we notice that those methods tend to rely heavily on customized vertex programs (or shaders) and fragment programs. Many hardware functions such as the multisampling and anisotropic texture filtering features that could be equally useful for both triangle-based rendering and point-based rendering are seldom put to use in current EWA surface splatting methods. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective change to the EWA surface splatting method by removing the low-pass filter from the resampling process. The low-pass filtering is then taken care of by multisampling (for full-scene antialiasing). This simple change effectively extracts the screen-space issues out of the EWA surface splatting problem. Therefore, the remaining parts of EWA surface splatting become purely object-space problems which are much easier to solve. For example, perspective accurate splatting which requires special attention in some screen-space surface splatting algorithms is easily achieved as long as the hardware supports perspective-correct interpolation. Other hardware features such as anisotropic texture filtering can be easily added as well. Our results show the rendering quality is comparable to those produced with resampling filters with tightly-coupled low-pass filters. We also achieve rendering speed of about 6 million splats per second. ∗e-mail: [email protected] †e-mail: [email protected] ‡e-mail: [email protected] CR Categories: I.3.3 [Computer Graphics]: Picture/Image Generation—Display Algorithms—; I.3.6 [Computer Graphics]: Methodology and Techniques—Graphics Data Structures and Data Types—;