Vineet Goel

GPU smoothing of quad meshes

We present a fast algorithm for converting quad meshes on the GPU to smooth surfaces. Meshes with 12,000 input quads, of which 60% have one or more non-4-valent vertices, are converted, evaluated and rendered with 9times9 resolution per quad at 50 frames per second. The conversion reproduces bi-cubic splines wherever possible and closely mimics the shape of the Catmull-Clark subdivision surface by c-patches where a vertex has a valence different from 4. The smooth surface is piecewise polynomial and has well-defined normals everywhere. The evaluation avoids pixel dropout.

Real-Time Global Illumination on GPUs

We have developed a system for computing a plausible global illumination solution for dynamic environments in real time on programmable graphics processors (GPUs). The entire algorithm runs on DirectX 9.0 compatible graphics hardware using vertex and fragment shaders, and computes a global illumination solution for reasonably complex scenes with moving objects and moving lights at frame rates of 10-40 fps. We present the salient steps of the algorithm that made this real time global illumination evaluation possible.

Interactive global illumination in dynamic environments using commodity graphics hardware

We present a system based on commodity graphics hardware for computing global illumination in dynamic scenes at interactive rates. We designed a progressive global illumination algorithm specifically to take advantage of current graphics hardware features. Our algorithm simulates the transport of light in synthetic environments by following the light emitted from the light source(s) through its multiple bounces on the surfaces of the scene. The entire algorithm runs on ATIs Radeon 9700 using vertex and fragment shaders, allowing us to compute and display a global illumination solution for reasonably complex scenes with moving objects and moving lights in approximately 250 milliseconds (4 frames per second).

Mesh mutation in programmable graphics hardware

We show how a future graphics processor unit (GPU), enhanced with random read and write to video memory, can represent, refine and adjust complex meshes arising in modeling, simulation and animation. To leverage SIMD parallelism, a general model based on the mesh atlas is developed and a particular implementation without adjacency pointers is proposed in which primal, binary refinement of, possibly mixed, quadrilateral and triangular meshes of arbitrary topological genus, as well as their traversal is supported by user-transparent programmable graphics hardware. Adjustment, such as subdivision smoothing rules, is realized as user-programmable mesh shader routines. Attributes are generic and can be defined in the graphics application by binding them to one of several general addressing mechanisms.