Hardware Accelerated Displacement Mapping for Image Based Rendering

Abstract

In this paper, we present a technique for rendering displacement mapped geometry using current graphics hardware. Our method renders a displacement by slicing through the enclosing volume. The alpha-test is used to render only the appropriate parts of every slice. The slices need not to be aligned with the base surface, e.g. it is possible to do screen-space aligned slicing. We then extend the method to be able to render the intersection between several displacement mapped polygons. This is used to render a new kind of image-based objects based on images with depth, which we call image based depth objects. This technique can also directly be used to accelerate the rendering of objects using the image-based visual hull. Other warping based IBR techniques can be accelerated in a similar manner.