Abstract

. We discuss adaptive enumeration and rendering methods for implicit surfaces, using octrees computed with affine arithmetic, a new tool for range analysis. Affine arithmetic is similar to standard interval arithmetic, but takes into account correlations between operands and sub-formulas, generally providing much tighter bounds for the computed quantities. The resulting octrees are accordingly much smaller, and the rendering faster. We also describe applications of affine arithmetic to intersection and ray tracing of implicit surfaces. keywords: cellular models, interval analysis, rendering, implicit surfaces. 1 Introduction Implicit surfaces have recently become popular in computer graphics and solid modeling. In order to exploit existing hardware and algorithms, it is often necessary to approximate such surfaces by models with simpler geometry, such as polygonal meshes or voxel arrays. Let S be a surface defined implicitly by the equation h(x; y; z) = 0. A simple and general techn...

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