GPU-Based Ray-Casting of Quadratic Surfaces

Abstract

Quadratic surfaces are frequently used primitives in geometric modeling and scientific visualization, such as rendering of tensor fields, particles, and molecular structures. While high visual quality can be achieved using sophisticated ray tracing techniques, interactive applications typically use either coarsely tessellated polygonal approximations or pre-rendered depth sprites, thereby trading off visual quality and perspective correctness for higher rendering performance. In contrast, we propose an efficient rendering technique for quadric primitives based on GPU-accelerated splatting. While providing similar performance as point-sprites, our methods provides perspective correctness and superior visual quality using per-pixel ray-casting.