Semi-uniform, 2-different tessellation of triangular parametric surfaces

With a greater number of real-time graphics applications moving over to parametric surfaces from the polygonal domain, there is an inherent need to address various rendering bottlenecks that could hamper the move. Scaling the polygon count over various hardware platforms becomes an important factor. Much control is needed over the tessellation levels, either imposed by the hardware limitations or by the application. Developers like to create applications that run on various platforms without having to switch between polygonal and parametric versions to satisfy the limitations. In this paper, we present SD-2 (Semi-uniform, 2-Different), an adaptive tessellation algorithm for triangular parametric surfaces. The algorithm produces well distributed and semi-uniformly shaped triangles as a result of the tessellation. The SD-2 pattern requires new approaches for determining the edge tessellation factors, which can be fractional and change continuously depending on view parameters. The factors are then used to steer the tessellation of the parametric surface into a collection of triangle strips in a single pass. We compare the tessellation results in terms of GPU performance and surface quality by implementing SD-2 on PN patches.