Abstract

Displacement mapping is a powerful mechanism for adding fine to medium geometric details over a 3D surface using a 2D map encoding them. While GPU rasterization supports it through the hardware tessellation unit, ray tracing surface meshes textured with high quality displacement requires a significant amount of memory. More precisely, the input surface needs to be pre-tessellated at the displacement map resolution before being enriched with its mandatory acceleration data structure. Consequently, designing displacement maps interactively while enjoying a full physically-based rendering is often impossible, as simply tiling multiple times the map quickly saturates the graphics memory. In this work we introduce a new tessellation-free displacement mapping approach for ray tracing. Our key insight is to decouple the displacement from its base domain by mapping a displacement-specific acceleration structures directly on the mesh. As a result, our method shows low memory footprint and fast high resolution displacement rendering, making interactive displacement editing possible.

Downloads

• Manuscript: ACM open access
• Manuscript (authors preprint): full res. (125MB) and low res. (41MB)
• Video: MP4 (194MB)

Videos

Paper's video

Short talk at SIGGRAPH Asia 2021

Full talk at SIGGRAPH Asia 2021

Bibtex

@article{TBSCB:2021:TFDM,
author = {Thonat, Theo and Beaune, Francois and Sun, Xin and Carr, Nathan and Boubekeur, Tamy},
title = {Tessellation-Free Displacement Mapping for Ray Tracing},
year = {2021},
issue_date = {December 2021},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
volume = {40},
number = {6},
issn = {0730-0301},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3478513.3480535},
doi = {10.1145/3478513.3480535},
month = {dec},
articleno = {282},
numpages = {16},
keywords = {affine arithmetic, displacement mapping, ray tracing}
}