Hardware-accelerated free-form deformation

Abstract

Hardware-acceleration for geometric deformation is developed in the framework of an extension to the OpenGL specification. The method requires an addition to the front-end of the OpenGL rendering pipeline and an appropriate OpenGL primitive. Our approach is to implement general geometric deformations so the system supports additional layers of abstraction, including physically based simulations. This approach would support a wide range of users with an accelerated implementation of a well-understood deformation method, reducing the need for software deformation engines and the execution time penalty associated with them.