Silhouette Texture

Hongzhi Wu, Li-Yi Wei, Xi Wang, and Baining Guo

EUROGRAPHICS Symposium on Rendering, 2006.



outer hull + normal map
1000 vertices

original mesh
40002 vertices 308 fps

our result
1000 vertices 725 fps

Silhouette texture rendering. Our silhouette texture significantly speeds up rendering speed while faithfully reproduce both interior and exterior silouettes. All frame-rates reported in this paper are measured on a NVIDIA Geforce-7800-GT chip with a viewport size 512กม512.

Abstract:

Using coarse meshes with textures and/or normal maps to represent detailed meshes often results in poor visual quality along silhouettes. To tackle this problem, we introduce silhouette texture, a new data structure for capturing and reconstructing the silhouettes of detailed meshes. In addition to the recording of color and normal fields in traditional methods, we sample information that represents the original silhouettes and pack it into a three dimensional texture. In the rendering stage, our algorithm extracts relevant information from the texture to rebuild the silhouettes for any perspective view. Unlike previous work, our approach is based on GPU and could achieve high rendering performance. Moreover, both exterior and interior silhouettes are processed for better approximation quality. In addition to rendering acceleration, our algorithm also enables detailed silhouette visualization with minimum geometric complexity.

Available information:


lywei@microsoft.com