Phong Tessellation

Abstract

Modern 3D engines used in real-time applications provide shading that hides the lack of higher order continuity inside the shapes using modulated normals, textures, and tone-mapping -- artifacts remain only on interior contours and silhouettes if the surface geometry is not smooth. The basic idea in this paper is to apply a purely local refinement strategy that inflates the geometry enough to avoid these artifacts. Our technique is a geometric version of Phong normal interpolation, not applied on normals but on the vertex positions. We call this strategy Phong Tessellation.