Synchronized tracing of primitive-based implicit volumes

Abstract

Implicit volumes are known for their ability to represent smooth shapes of arbitrary topology thanks to hierarchical combinations of primitives using a structure called a blobtree. We present a new tile-based rendering pipeline well suited for modeling scenarios, i.e., no preprocessing is required when primitive parameters are updated. When using approximate signed distance fields (fields with Lipschitz bound close to 1), we rely on compact, smooth CSG operators - extended from standard bounded operators - to compute a tight augmented bounding volume for all primitives of the blobtree. The pipeline relies on a low-resolution A-buffer storing the primitives of interest of a given screen tile. The A-buffer is then used during ray processing to synchronize threads within a subfrustum. This allows coherent field evaluation within workgroups. We use a sparse bottom-up tree traversal to prune the blobtree on-the-fly which allows us to decorrelate field evaluation complexity from the full blobtree size. The ray processing itself is done using the sphere tracing algorithm. The pipeline scales well to volumes consisting of thousands of primitives.