GPU-Based Ray Casting of Quadratic Surfaces

Abstract

Quadratic surfaces are frequently used primitives in geometric modeling and scientific visualization, such as rendering of tensor fields, particles, and molecular structures. While high visual quality can be achieved using sophisticated ray tracing techniques, interactive applications typically use either coarsely tessellated polygonal approximations or pre-rendered depth sprites, thereby trading off visual quality and perspective correctness for higher rendering performance. In contrast, we propose an efficient rendering technique for quadric primitives based on GPU-accelerated splatting. While providing similar performance as point-sprites, our methods provides perspective correctness and superior visual quality using per-pixel ray-casting.

Citation Style:    Display Alpha ACM SIGGRAPH IEEEtran Publication

GPU-Based Ray Casting of Quadratic Surfaces. Christian Sigg, Tim Weyrich, Mario Botsch, Markus Gross. In Proceedings of Eurographics Symposium on Point-Based Graphics, July 29-30, 2006, Boston.Christian Sigg, Tim Weyrich, Mario Botsch, and Markus Gross. GPU-based ray-casting of quadratic surfaces. In Proceedings of 3rd Eurographics Symposium on Point-Based Graphics, pages 59–65. Eurographics Association, July 2006.Sigg, C., Weyrich, T., Botsch, M., and Gross, M. 2006. GPU-based ray-casting of quadratic surfaces. In Proceedings of 3rd Eurographics Symposium on Point-Based Graphics, Eurographics Association, 59–65.C. Sigg, T. Weyrich, M. Botsch, and M. Gross, “GPU-based ray-casting of quadratic surfaces,” in Proceedings of 3rd Eurographics Symposium on Point-Based Graphics. Eurographics Association, Jul. 2006, pp. 59–65. PDF Video Errata BibTeX