Programmable Shaders for Deformation Rendering

Abstract

In this paper, we present a method for rendering deformations as part of the programmable shader pipeline of contemporary Graphical Processing Units. In our method, we allow general deformations including cuts. Previous approaches to deformation place the role of the GPU as a general purpose processor for computing vertex displacement.With the advent of vertex texture fetch in current GPUs, a number of approaches have been proposed to integrate deformation into the rendering pipeline. However, the rendering of cuts cannot be easily programmed into a vertex shader, due to the inability to change the topology of the mesh. Furthermore, rendering smooth deformed surfaces requires a fine tessellation of the mesh, in order to prevent self-intersection and meshing artifacts for large deformations. In our approach, we overcome these problems by considering deformation as a part of the pixel shader, where transformation is performed on a per-pixel basis. We demonstrate how this approach can be efficiently implemented using contemporary graphics hardware to obtain high-quality rendering of deformation at interactive rates.