Micro-Mesh Construction

Abstract

Micro-meshes (μ-meshes) are a new structured graphics primitive supporting a large increase in geometric fidelity, without commensurate memory and run-time processing costs, consisting of a base mesh enriched by a displacement map. A new generation of GPUs supports this structure with native hardware μ-mesh ray-tracing, that leverages a self-bounding, compressed displacement mapping scheme to achieve these efficiencies. In this paper, we present anautomatic method to convert an existing multi-million triangle mesh into this compact format, unlocking the advantages of the data representation for a large number of scenarios. We identify the requirements for high-quality μ-meshes, and show how existing re-meshing and displacement-map baking tools are ill-suited for their generation. Our method is based on a simplification scheme tailored to the generation of high-quality base meshes , optimized for tessellation and displacement sampling, in conjunction with algorithms for determining displacement vectors to control the direction and range of displacements. We also explore the optimization of μ-meshes for texture maps and the representation of boundaries. We demonstrate our method with extensive batch processing, converting an existing collection of high-resolution scanned models to the micro-mesh representation, providing an open-source reference implementation, and, as additional material, the data and an inspection tool.