@Article{cmes.2024.054238,
AUTHOR = {Jiayu Ren, Susumu Nakata},
TITLE = {A Fast and Memory-Efficient Direct Rendering Method for Polynomial-Based Implicit Surfaces},
JOURNAL = {Computer Modeling in Engineering \& Sciences},
VOLUME = {141},
YEAR = {2024},
NUMBER = {2},
PAGES = {1033--1046},
URL = {http://www.techscience.com/CMES/v141n2/58158},
ISSN = {1526-1506},
ABSTRACT = {Three-dimensional surfaces are typically modeled as implicit surfaces. However, direct rendering of implicit surfaces is not simple, especially when such surfaces contain finely detailed shapes. One approach is ray-casting, where the field of the implicit surface is assumed to be piecewise polynomials defined on the grid of a rectangular domain. A critical issue for direct rendering based on ray-casting is the computational cost of finding intersections between surfaces and rays. In particular, ray-casting requires many function evaluations along each ray, severely slowing the rendering speed. In this paper, a method is proposed to achieve direct rendering of polynomial-based implicit surfaces in real-time by strategically narrowing the search range and designing the shader to exploit the structure of piecewise polynomials. In experiments, the proposed method achieved a high framerate performance for different test cases, with a speed-up factor ranging from 1.1 to 218.2. In addition, the proposed method demonstrated better efficiency with high cell resolution. In terms of memory consumption, the proposed method saved between 90.94% and 99.64% in different test cases. Generally, the proposed method became more memory-efficient as the cell resolution increased.},
DOI = {10.32604/cmes.2024.054238}
}