In this paper we present an algorithm capable of rendering a displacement mapped triangle mesh interactively on latest GPUs. The algorithm uses only pixel shaders and does not rely on adaptively adding geometry. All sampling of the displacement map takes place in the pixel shader and bi- or trilinear filtering can be applied to it, and at the same time as the calculations are done per pixel in the shader, the algorithm has automatic level of detail control. The triangles of the base mesh are extruded along the respective normal directions and then the resulting prisms are rendered by casting rays inside and intersecting them with the displaced surface. Two different implementations are discussed in detail.

Displacement mapping is a technique for applying fine geometric detail to a simpler base surface. The displacement is specified as a scalar function which makes it relatively easy to increase visual complexity without the difficulties inherent in more general modeling techniques. We would like to use displacement mapping in real-time applications. Ideally, a graphics accelerator should create a polygonal tessellation of the displaced surface on the fly to avoid storage and host bandwidth overheads. We present an online

Clustering is a very efficient technique to apply finite element methods to the computation of radiosity solutions of complex scenes. Both computation time and memory consumption can be reduced dramatically by grouping the primitives of the input scene into a hierarchy of clusters and allowing for light exchange between all levels of this hierarchy. However, problems can arise due to clustering, when gross approximations about a cluster's content result in unsatisfactory solutions or unnecessary computations. In the clustering approach for diffuse global illumination described in this paper, light exchange between two objects --- patches or clusters --- is bounded by using geometrical and shading information provided by every object through a uniform interface. With this uniform view of various kinds of objects, comparable and reliable error bounds on the light exchange can be computed, which then guide a standard hierarchical radiosity algorithm.

We show how to use affine arithmetic to represent a parametric curve with a strip tree. The required bounding rectangles for pieces of the curve are computed by exploiting the linear correlation information given by affine arithmetic. As an application, we show how to compute approximate distance fields for parametric curves.

Affine arithmetic is a model for self-validated numerical computation that affine arithmetic keeps track of first-order correlations between computed and input quantities. We explain the main concepts in affine arithmetic and it handles the dependency problem in standard interval arithmetic. We also describe some of its applications.

Existing techniques for rendering arbitrary-form implicit surfaces are limited, either in performance, correctness or flexibility. Ray tracing algorithms employing interval arithmetic (IA) or affine arithmetic (AA) for root-finding are robust and general in the class of surfaces they support, but traditionally slow. Nonetheless, implemented efficiently using a stack-driven iterative algorithm and SIMD vector instructions, these methods can achieve interactive performance for common algebraic surfaces on the CPU. A similar algorithm can also be implemented stacklessly, allowing for efficient ray tracing on the GPU. This paper presents these algorithms, as well as an inclusion-preserving reduced affine arithmetic (RAA) for faster ray-surface intersection. Shader metaprogramming allows for immediate and automatic generation of symbolic expressions and their interval or affine extensions. Moreover, we are able to render even complex forms robustly, in real-time at high resolution.

A method for ray casting implicit surfaces, defined with procedural noise models, is presented. The method is robust in that it is able to guarantee correct intersections at all image pixels and for all types of implicit surfaces. This robustness comes from the use of an affine arithmetic representation for the quantity that expresses the variation of the implicit function along a ray. Affine arithmetic provides a bounding interval estimate which is tighter than the interval estimates returned by conventional interval arithmetic. Our ray casting method is also efficient due to a proposed modification in the data structure used to hold affine arithmetic quantities. This modified data structure ultimately leads to a reduced affine arithmetic model. We show that such a reduced affine arithmetic model is able to retain all the tight estimation capabilities of standard affine arithmetic, in the context of ray casting implicit procedural noises, while being faster to compute and more efficient to store. We also show that, without this reduced model, affine arithmetic would not have any advantage over the more conventional interval arithmetic for ray casting the class of implicit procedural surfaces that we are interested in visualizing.

This paper reviews the latest developments of displacement mapping algorithms implemented on the vertex, geometry, and fragment shaders of graphics cards. Displacement mapping algorithms are classified as per-vertex and per-pixel methods. Per-pixel approaches are further categorized as safe algorithms that aim at correct solutions in all cases, to unsafe techniques that may fail in extreme cases but are usually much faster than safe algorithms, and to combined methods that exploit the robustness of safe and the speed of unsafe techniques. We discuss the possible roles of vertex, geometry, and fragment shaders to implement these algorithms. Then the particular GPU based bump, parallax, relief, sphere, horizon mapping, cone stepping, local ray tracing, pyramidal and view-dependent displacement mapping methods, as well as their numerous variations are reviewed providing also implementation details of the shader programs. We present these methods using uniform notations and also point out when different authors called similar concepts differently. In addition to basic displacement mapping, self-shadowing and silhouette processing are also reviewed. Based on our experiences gained having re-implemented these methods, their performance and quality are compared, and the advantages and disadvantages are fairly presented.

We study the performance of affine arithmetic as a replacement for interval arithmetic in interval methods for ray casting implicit surfaces. Affine arithmetic is a variant of interval arithmetic designed to handle the dependency problem, and which has improved several interval algorithms in computer graphics.

Hypertextures are a useful modelling tool in that they can add three-dimensional detail to the surface of otherwise smooth objects. Hypertextures can be rendered as implicit surfaces, resulting in objects with a complex but well defined boundary. However, representing a hypertexture as an implicit surface often results in many small parts being detached from the main surface, turning an object into a disconnected set. Depending on the context, this can detract from the realism in a scene where one usually does not expect a solid object to have clouds of smaller objects floating around it. We present a topology correction technique, integrated in a ray casting algorithm for hypertextured implicit surfaces, that detects and removes all the surface components that have become disconnected from the main surface. Our method works with implicit surfaces that are C 2 continuous and uses Morse theory to find the critical points of the surface. The method follows the separatrix lines joining the critical points to isolate disconnected components. 1.