Edge-Friend: Fast and Deterministic Catmull-Clark Subdivision Surfaces

Abstract

We present edge-friend, a data structure for quad meshes with access to neighborhood information required for Catmull-Clark subdivision surface refinement. Edge-friend enables efficient real-time subdivision surface rendering. In particular, the resulting algorithm is deterministic, does not require hardware support for atomic floating-point arithmetic, and is optimized for efficient rendering on GPUs. Edge-friend exploits that after one subdivision step, two edges can be uniquely and implicitly assigned to each quad. Additionally, edge-friend is a compact data structure, adding little overhead. Our algorithm is simple to implement in a single compute shader kernel, and requires minimal synchronization which makes it particularly suited for asynchronous execution. We easily extend our kernel to support relevant Catmull-Clark subdivision surface features, including semi-smooth creases, boundaries, animation and attribute interpolation. In case of topology changes, our data structure requires little preprocessing, making it amendable for a variety of applications, including real-time editing and animations. Our method can process and render billions of triangles per second on modern GPUs. For a sample mesh, our algorithm generates and renders 2.9 million triangles in 0.58ms on an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU.