Displacement patches for GPU-oriented view-dependent rendering

In this paper we present a new approach for interactive view-dependent rendering of large polygonal datasets, which relies on advanced features of modern graphics hardware. Our preprocessing algorithm starts by generating a simplified representation of the input mesh. It then builds a multiresolution hierarchy for the simplified model. For each face in the hierarchy, it generates and assigns a displacement map that resembles the original surface represented by that face. At runtime, the multiresolution hierarchy is used to select a coarse viewdependent level-of-detail representation, which is sent to the graphics hardware. The GPU then refines the coarse representation by replacing each face with a planar patch, which is elevated according to the assigned displacement map. Initial results show that our implementation achieves quality images at high rates.