Subodh Kumar Dinesh Manocha Anselmo Lastra
Department of Computer Science
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill NC 27599
We present serial and parallel algorithms for interactive rendering of large-scale and complex NURBS models on current graphics systems. The algorithms tessellate the NURBS surfaces into triangles and render them using triangle rendering engines. The main characteristics of the algorithms are improved polygonization algorithms, exploitation of spatial and temporal coherence and back-patch culling. Polygonization anomalies like cracks and angularities are avoided. We analyze a number of issues in parallelization of these techniques, as well. The algorithms work well in practice and are able to display models consisting of thousands of surfaces at interactive frame rates. on the highly parallel graphics system, Pixel-Planes 5.
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Supported by DARPA ISTO Order No. A410,
NSF Grant MIP-9306208,
NSF Grant CCR-9319957,
ARPA Contract DABT63-93-C-0048,
NSF/ARPA Science and Technology
Center for Computer Graphics and Scientific Visualization,
NSF Prime Contract 8920219, and
ONR Contract N00014-94-1-0738.
Postscript (9 pages, 491K gzipped).