Hardware-Accelerated Point Generation and Rendering of Point-Based Impostors

J. Andreas Bærentzen
Technical University of Denmark

This paper appears in issue Volume 10, Number 2.
An electronic version of this article is available.

Abstract

This paper presents a novel scheme for generating points from triangle models. The method is fast and lends itself well to implementation using graphics hardware. The triangle to point conversion is done by rendering the models, and the rendering may be performed procedurally or by a black box API.

I describe the technique in detail and discuss how the generated point sets can easily be used as impostors for the original triangle models used to create the points. Since the points reside solely in GPU memory, these impostors are fairly efficient. Source code is available online.

Author Information

J. Andreas Bærentzen, Technical University of Denmark, Informatics and Mathematical Modelling, Bldg 3212800 Lyngby, Denmark jab@imm.dtu.dk

Images

The images of Figure 1 in the text are viewable here at larger scale; click on a thumbnail to see the full image.

Animation

Animation of the scene of Figure 3: point-rendered tree impostors in a simple landscape. Close trees are rendered using triangles or a blend of triangles and points. Farther trees are rendered exclusively using points.

Source Code

C++ source code for both generation and point rendering is available in this downloadable archive: PointSrc.tgz (748K)

BibTeX Entry

@article{Baerentzen05,
  author = "J. Andreas Bærentzen",
  title = "Hardware-Accelerated Point Generation and Rendering of Point-Based Impostors",
  journal = "journal of graphics, gpu, and game tools",
  volume = "10",
  number = "2",
  pages = "1-12",
  year = "2005",
}