ETER: Elastic Tessellation for Real-Time Pixel-Accurate Rendering of Large-Scale NURBS Models
Authors: 
Ruicheng Xiong, Yang Lu, Cong Chen, Jiaming Zhu, Yajun Zeng, Ligang LiuAuthors Info & Claims
Ruicheng Xiong, Yang Lu, Cong Chen, Jiaming Zhu, Yajun Zeng, Ligang LiuAuthors Info & ClaimsArticle No.: 133, Pages 1 - 13
Abstract
We present ETER, an elastic tessellation framework for rendering large-scale NURBS models with pixel-accurate and crack-free quality at real-time frame rates. We propose a highly parallel adaptive tessellation algorithm to achieve pixel accuracy, measured by the screen space error between the exact surface and its triangulation. To resolve a bottleneck in NURBS rendering, we present a novel evaluation method based on uniform sampling grids and accelerated by GPU Tensor Cores. Compared to evaluation based on hardware tessellation, our method has achieved a significant speedup of 2.9 to 16.2 times depending on the degrees of the patches. We develop an efficient crack-filling algorithm based on conservative rasterization and visibility buffer to fill the tessellation-induced cracks while greatly reducing the jagged effect introduced by conservative rasterization. We integrate all our novel algorithms, implemented in CUDA, into a GPU NURBS rendering pipeline based on Mesh Shaders and hybrid software/hardware rasterization. Our performance data on a commodity GPU show that the rendering pipeline based on ETER is capable of rendering up to 3.7 million patches (0.25 billion tessellated triangles) in real-time (30FPS). With its advantages in performance, scalability, and visual quality in rendering large-scale NURBS models, a real-time tessellation solution based on ETER can be a powerful alternative or even a potential replacement for the existing pre-tessellation solution in CAD systems.
Supplementary Material
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Index Terms
- ETER: Elastic Tessellation for Real-Time Pixel-Accurate Rendering of Large-Scale NURBS Models
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Published: 26 July 2023
Published in TOG Volume 42, Issue 4
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