VoxelPipe: A Programmable Pipeline for 3D Voxelization

Abstract

We present a highly exible and e cient software pipeline for programmable triangle voxelization. The pipeline, entirely written in CUDA, supports both fully conservative and thinvoxelizations, multiple boolean, oating point, vector-typed render targets, user-de ned vertex and fragment shaders, and a bucketing mode which can be used to generate 3D A-bu ers containing the entire list of fragments belonging to each voxel. For maximum e ciency, voxelization is implemented as a sort-middle tile-based rasterizer, while the A-bu er mode, essentially performing 3D binning of triangles over uniform grids, uses a sort-last pipeline. Despite its major exibility, the performance of our tile-based rasterizer is always competitive with and sometimes more than an order of magnitude superior to that of state-of-the-artbinary voxelizers, whereas our bucketing system is up to 4 times faster than previous implementations. In both cases the results have been achieved through the use of carefulload-balancing and high performance sorting primitives.