Surfel-Based Billboard Hierarchies for Fast Rendering of 3D-Objects

Abstract

In recent years point hierarchies have been shown to be efficient for rendering high-detailed objects. Since texture access is much faster than vertex processing we propose to increase efficiency of point based rendering of arbitrary surfaces using image-based techniques. For this purpose, we combine surfels and billboards. Such a surfel billboard contains a snapshot of the geometry it represents, and can be used to replace this geometry, if the actual viewing direction is close to the direction the snapshot was taken from. Such surfel billboards can be arranged in a hierarchy to create an impostor for arbitrary view-dependant LOD. In this paper we develop a framework that contains automatic surfel billboard placement, surfel billboard hierarchy creation and a carefully adaption of texture sizes that considers probability of billboard validity and available texture memory. Furthermore, we show how surfel billboard hierarchies can be combined with traditional triangle-based multi-resolution techniques to realize a hybrid rendering with a seamless LOD-transition using a user-defined image error.