STAMMINGER M.: RealTime Local Displacement using Dynamic GPU Memory Management

Figure 1: Local displacement such as the character footprints (left) or sculpting brushes (center) including vector displacement (right) are applied to arbitrary geometry using hardware tessellation patterns. Memory for displacement is dynamically allocated on the GPU. The total time to apply a deformation is less than a millisecond, even for complex models and scenes. We propose a novel method for local displacement events in large scenes, such as scratches, footsteps, or sculpting operations. De-formations are stored as displacements for vertices generated by hardware tessellation. Adaptive mesh refinement, application of the displacement and all involved memory management happen com-pletely on the GPU. We show various extensions to our approach, such as on-the-fly normal computation and multi-resolution editing. In typical game scenes we perform local deformations at arbitrary positions in far less than one millisecond. This makes the method particularly suited for games and interactive sculpting applications