Surfels: surface elements as rendering primitives

Surface elements (surfels) are a powerful paradigm to efficiently render complex geometric objects at interactive frame rates. Unlike classical surface discretizations, i.e., triangles or quadrilateral meshes, surfels are point primitives without explicit connectivity. Surfel attributes comprise depth, texture color, normal, and others. As a pre-process, an octree-based surfel representation of a geometric object is computed. During sampling, surfel positions and normals are optionally perturbed, and different levels of texture colors are prefiltered and stored per surfel. During rendering, a hierarchical forward warping algorithm projects surfels to a z-buffer. A novel method called visibility splatting determines visible surfels and holes in the z-buffer. Visible surfels are shaded using texture filtering, Phong illumination, and environment mapping using per-surfel normals. Several methods of image reconstruction, including supersampling, offer flexible speed-quality tradeoffs....

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: SIGGRAPH
• Authors: Hanspeter Pfister, Matthias Zwicker, Jeroen van Baar, Markus H. Gross
• Keywords: Computer Graphics, Geometric Object, SIGGRAPH 2000, Texture Colors, Visible Surfels