SYNTHESIS OF BÉZIER SURFACES ON THE GPU
Raquel Concheiro, Margarita Amor, Montserrat Bóo · 2010
Bezier surfaces are one of the most useful primitives employed for high quality modeling in CAD/CAM tools and graphics software. Traditionally, the Bezier representations are usually tessellated on the CPU (Central Processing Unit) and the set of generated triangles is sent to the GPU (Graphic Processing Unit). The CPU-GPU bus can become a bottleneck in this approach due to the large number of triangles generated for high quality models. In this paper we present two proposals for synthesizing the Bezier models directly in the GPU. With this strategy the compact representation associated with the Bezier models is sent to the GPU where the rendering is performed. The first proposal is based on the exploitation of the vertex shader to perform the tessellation. In this case a parametric map guides the computation of the final coordinates of a set of virtual vertices. Our second proposal is based on the efficient exploitation of the geometry shader capabilities to perform the tessellation in a direct way. Tests performed show that both proposals produce high quality images and promising results for real time rendering of complex parametric models.