SIGGRAPH 2009: Efficient Substitutes for Subdivision Surfaces

Wednesday, 5 August | 1:45 PM - 5:30 PM | Auditorium A

Overview

The goal of this course is to familiarize attendees with the practical aspects of subdivision surfaces for which we introduce substitutes for increased efficiency in real-time applications. The course starts by highlighting the properties that make SubD modeling attractive and introduces some recent techniques to capture these properties by alternative surface representations with a smaller foot-print. We list and compare the new surface representations and focus on their implementation on current and next-generation GPUs. Among the advantages and disadvantages of each approach, we address crucial practical issues, such as watertight evaluation, creases and corners, and seamless displacement mapping. Finally and most importantly, Valve and Industrial Light Magic will present a few breathtaking practical examples and demonstrate how these advanced techniques have been adopted into their gaming and movie production pipelines.

Course Materials

• Course notes (The first three chapters)
  ILM’s chapter is currently available only through the conference DVD, but we hope to be able to distribute it online in the future.
• Slides
  • Fundamentals of Efficient Substitutes for Catmull-Clark Subdivision Surfaces
  • Implementation
  • Approximating Subdivision Surfaces in Valve’s Source Engine
  • Approximating Subdivision Surfaces in ILM’s Toolchain

Course Organizers

• Tianyun Ni, NVIDIA Corporation
• Ignacio Castaño, NVIDIA Corporation

Course Speakers

• Jörg Peters, University of Florida
• Tianyun Ni, NVIDIA Corporation
• Jason Mitchell, Valve Corporation
• Philip Schneider, Industrial Light and Magic
• Vivek Verma, Industrial Light and Magic

Program

1. 1:45 pm: Introduction & Overview
   Ignacio Castaño
2. 1:50 pm: Fundamentals of Efficient Substitutes for Catmull-Clark Subdivision Surfaces
   Jörg Peters
3. 2:30 pm: Implementation
   Tianyun Ni
4. 3:30 pm: Break
5. 3:45 pm: Approximating Subdivision Surfaces in Valve’s Source Engine
   Jason Mitchell
6. 4:45 pm: Approximating Subdivision Surfaces in ILM’s Toolchain
   Philip Schneider and Vivek Verna

Additional Materials

• Instanced Tessellation of Subdivision Surfaces Direct3D example by NVIDIA
• Instanced Tessellation OpenGL example by NVIDIA

Selected References

• [Boubekeur08] Tamy Boubekeur and Christophe Schlick, “A Flexible Kernel for Adaptive Mesh Refinement on GPU,” Computer Graphics Forum, 27(1):102–114, 2008
• [Hasselgren09] Jon Hasselgren, Jacob Munkberg, Tomas Akenine-Möller, “Automatic Pre-Tessellation Culling,” ACM Transactions on Graphics , Vol. 28 No. 2, April 2009.
• [Kovacs09] Denis Kovacs, Jason Mitchell, Shanon Drone and Denis Zorin, "Real-Time Creased Approximate Subdivision Surfaces," ACM Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, 2009.
• [Loop08] Charles Loop and Scott Schaefer, “Approximating Catmull-Clark Subdivision Surfaces with Bicubic Patches,” ACM Transactions on Graphics, Vol. 27 No. 1 Article 8 March 2008.
• [MNP08] Ashish Myles, Tianyun Ni, and Jörg Peters. Fast Parallel Construction of Smooth Surfaces from Meshes with Tri/Quad/Pent Facets. In Symposium on Geometry Processing, July 2 - 4, 2008, Copenhagen, Denmark, pages 1–8. Blackwell, 2008.
• [Tatarinov08] Andrei Tatarinov, “Instanced Tessellation in DirectX 10,” Game Developer’s Conference 2008.
• [VPBM01] Alex Vlachos, Jörg Peters, Chas Boyd, and Jason Mitchell. Curved PN Triangles. In I3D 2001: Proceedings of the 2001 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, pages 159–166, 2001.