Approximating Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces with bicubic patches Academic Article

abstract

• We present a simple and computationally efficient algorithm for approximating Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces using a minimal set of bicubic patches. For each quadrilateral face of the control mesh, we construct a geometry patch and a pair of tangent patches. The geometry patches approximate the shape and silhouette of the Catmull-Clark surface and are smooth everywhere except along patch edges containing an extraordinary vertex where the patches are C 0 . To make the patch surface appear smooth, we provide a pair of tangent patches that approximate the tangent fields of the Catmull-Clark surface. These tangent patches are used to construct a continuous normal field (through their cross-product) for shading and displacement mapping. Using this bifurcated representation, we are able to define an accurate proxy for Catmull-Clark surfaces that is efficient to evaluate on next-generation GPU architectures that expose a programmable tessellation unit.

authors

• Schaefer, Scott

published proceedings

• ACM TRANSACTIONS ON GRAPHICS

altmetric score

• 6

author list (cited authors)

• Loop, C., & Schaefer, S.

citation count

• 85

complete list of authors

• Loop, Charles||Schaefer, Scott

publication date

• March 2008

publisher

• Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)  Publisher

published in

• ACM TRANSACTIONS ON GRAPHICS  Journal

keywords

• Catmull-clark Subdivision
• Gpu Tessellation
• Performance
• Subdivision Surfaces

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

• 10.1145/1330511.1330519

start page

• 8

end page

• 11

volume

• 27

issue

• 1

URL

• http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1330511.1330519