TY  - EJOU
AU  - Ren, Jiayu 
AU  - Nakata, Susumu 

TI  - A Fast and Memory-Efficient Direct Rendering Method for Polynomial-Based Implicit Surfaces
T2  - Computer Modeling in Engineering \& Sciences

PY  - 2024
VL  - 141
IS  - 2
SN  - 1526-1506

AB  - 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.
KW  - Implicit surfaces; direct rendering; ray marching

DO  - 10.32604/cmes.2024.054238