Hardware Rendering of 3D Geometry with Elevation Maps

We present a generic framework for realtime rendering of 3D surfaces. We use the common elevation map primitive, by which a given surface is decomposed into a set of patches. Each patch is parameterized as an elevation map over a planar domain and resampled on a regular grid. While current hardware accelerated rendering approaches require conversion of this representation back into a triangle mesh or point set, we propose to render the elevation maps directly in a hardware accelerated environment. We use one base data set to render each patch in the common vertex and fragment shader pipeline. We implement meshor point-based rendering by using a base mesh or a base point set respectively. This provides the basis for the underlying primitive for the final rendering. We show the benefits of this method for splat rendering by replacing attribute blending through a simplified and fast attribute interpolation. This results in rendering acceleration as well as an improvement in visual quality when compared to previous approaches.