Clipping of Splats Adapted to the Curvatures of the Edges

Surface splatting is a fast rendering technique for point-based models that usually delivers good-quality renderings. However, the intrinsic characteristic of this technique is the treatment of points as if they were discs. That requires special processing near sharp edges and corners in order to prevent rendering artifacts from appearing. In this work, we present a clever way of clipping splats near sharp edges and corners by a classification of neighboring splats, which belong to distinct intersecting surfaces. Those neighboring splats that take part in the clipping process are called \emph{clip partners}. Their concavity or convexity with respect to one another are determined, as well as their relation with the clipped splat. In our approach, there is no need of distance computations nor of other complex operations during the rendering process, since the classification can be performed offline during a pre-processing phase. Our approach is particularly important for virtual reality and game applications, where there is high probability of rendered objects to be viewed in a short distance by observers that navigate inside the virtual environment. The examples presented in this paper demonstrate the importance of correctly clipping splats for high quality rendering.