Efficient GPU Rendering of Subdivision Surfaces

We present a novel method for real-time rendering of subdivision surfaces whose goal is to make subdivision faces as easy to render as triangles, points, or lines. Our approach uses standard GPU tessellation hardware and processes each face of a base mesh independently, thus allowing an entire model to be rendered in a single pass. The key idea of our method is to subdivide the u, v domain of each face ahead of time, generating a quadtree structure, and then submit one tessellated primitive per input face. By traversing the quadtree for each post-tessellation vertex, we are able to accurately and efficiently evaluate the limit surface.

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Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTGTviYwolE

Bib TeX: http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/~niessner/papers/2016/4subdiv/brainerd2016efficient.bib 

PDF:  http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/~niessner/papers/2016/4subdiv/brainerd2016efficient.pdf

Stanford Project: http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/~niessner/brainerd2016efficient.html