Adaptive Clipping of Splats to Models with Sharp Features

Abstract

Splat-based models are a good representation because of its absense of topology, making complex modeling operations easier, but keeping the same approximation ratio from triangular meshes. However corners cannot be properly represented by splats without clipping them. We present a new method for clipping splats in models with sharp features. Each splat is an ellipse equipped with a few parameters that allow to define how the ellipse can be clipped against a bidimensional rational Bézier curve and thus it can be used for all those surfaces that show a large number of edge features and different sampling rate around them. The simple and uniform data used to define the clipping curve makes easy the implementation in GPU. We designed and implemented an automatic computation of the clipping curves and a pipeline for sampling a generic surface with splats and render it. In this paper we show how this technique outperforms the previous clipping techniques in precision for objects such as mechanical parts and CAD- like models keeping the rendering speed.