Local Painting and Deformation of Meshes on the GPU

Figure 1: Interactive authoring using our dynamic GPU memory management approach. Left and right: simultaneous sculpting and painting on top of Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces. Center: local surface deformations in a larger 3D scene environ-ment. The total time to apply surface edits is well below a millisecond in all test examples. We present a novel method to adaptively apply modifications to scene data stored in GPU memory. Such modifi-cations may include interactive painting and sculpting operations in an authoring tool, or deformations resulting from collisions between scene objects detected by a physics engine. We only allocate GPU memory for the faces af-fected by these modifications to store fine-scale color or displacement values. This requires dynamic GPU memory management in order to assign and adaptively apply edits to individual faces at runtime. We present such a mem-ory management technique based on a scan-operation that is efficiently parallelizable. Since our approach runs entirely on the GPU, we avoid costly CPU-GPU memory transfer and eliminate typical bandwidth limitations. This minimizes runtime overhead to under a millisecond and makes our method ideally suited to many real-time applications such as video games and interactive authoring tools. In addition, our algorithm significantly reduces storage requirements and allows for much higher-resolution content compared to traditional global texturing ap-proaches. Our technique can be applied to various mesh representations, including Catmull-Clark subdivisio