Interval Shading: using Mesh Shaders to generate shading intervals for volume rendering

Abstract

We propose to use tetrahedrons as primitives for volume rendering and a pipeline to rasterize them. Our work relies on the recently introduced mesh shaders to encode each tetrahedron such that the rasterizer computes the depths of the front and back faces at the same time when interpolating vertices attributes. Then, the fragment shader receives the two depths and can compute its shading in the interval. Our method is simple to implement, efficient, and opens new possibilities for the rasterization pipeline.