Deferred Splatting

In recent years it has been shown that, above a certain complexity, points become the most efficient rendering primitives. Although the programmability of the lastest graphics hardware allows efficient implementation of high quality surface splatting algorithms, their performance remains below those obtained with simpler point based rendering algorithms when they are used for scenes of high complexity. In this paper, our goal is to apply high quality point based rendering algorithms on complex scenes. For this purpose, we show how to take advantage of temporal coherency in a very accurate hardware accelerated point selection algorithm allowing the expensive computations to be peformed only on visible points. Our algorithm is based on a multi-pass hardware accelerated EWA splatting. It is also suitable for any rendering application since no pre-process is needed and no assumption is made on the data structure. In addition, we briefly discuss the association of our method with other existing culling techniques and optimization for particular applications.