filename     : /home/mbotsch/dy/spbg05/pbg05.pdf
entry        : inproceedings
conference   : Eurographics Symposium on Point-Based Graphics, Stony Brook, USA, June 21-22, 2005
pages        : 17-24
year         : 2005
month        : June
title        : High-Quality Surface Splatting on Today's GPUs
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author       : Mario Botsch, Alexander Hornung, Matthias Zwicker, Leif Kobbelt
booktitle    : Proceedings of the Eurographics Symposium on Point-Based Graphics
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language     : english
keywords     : point-based rendering, GPU
abstract     : 

Because of their conceptual simplicity and superior flexibility,
point-based geometries evolved into a valuable alternative to surface
representations based on polygonal meshes. Elliptical surface splats
were shown to allow for high-quality anti-aliased rendering by
sophisticated EWA filtering. Since the publication of the original
software-based EWA splatting, several authors tried to map this
technique to the GPU in order to exploit hardware acceleration. Due to
the lacking support for splat primitives, these methods always have to
find a trade-off between rendering quality and rendering
performance. In this paper, we discuss the capabilities of today's
GPUs for hardware-accelerated surface splatting. We present an
approach that achieves a quality comparable to the original EWA
splatting at a rate of more than 20M elliptical splats per second. In
contrast to previous GPU renderers, our method provides per-pixel
Phong shading even for dynamically changing geometries and
high-quality anti-aliasing by employing a screen-space pre-filter in
addition to the object-space reconstruction filter. The use of
deferred shading techniques effectively avoids unnecessary shader
computations and additionally provides a clear separation between the
rasterization and the shading of elliptical splats, which considerably
simplifies the development of custom shaders. We demonstrate quality,
efficiency, and flexibility of our approach by showing several shaders
on a range of models.