Analytic Visibility on the GPU

Abstract

This paper presents a parallel, implementation-friendly analytic visibility method for triangular meshes. Together with an analytic filter convolution, it allows for a fully analytic solution to anti-aliased 3D mesh rendering on parallel hardware. Building on recent works in computational geometry, we present a new edge-triangle intersection algorithm and a novel method to complete the boundaries of all visible triangle regions after a hidden line elimination step. All stages of the method are embarrassingly parallel and easily implementable on parallel hardware. A GPU implementation is discussed and performance characteristics of the method are shown and compared to traditional sampling-based rendering methods.