High Performance Graphics (2014), pp. 1–8 Jonathan Ragan-Kelley and Ingo Wald (Editors) Real-Time Deformation of Subdivision Surfaces from Object Collisions

Figure 1: Example scenes showing our real-time surface deformation technique. The user-controlled car (left) and the ani-mated character (right) cause fine-scale deformations on the terrain surfaces. While deformable surfaces are represented as displaced Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces, we voxelize the actual surface geometry of rigid objects in order to determine their respective deformations. We present a novel real-time approach for fine-scale surface deformations resulting from collisions. Deformations are represented by a high-resolution displacement function. When two objects collide, these offsets are updated directly on the GPU based on a dynamically generated binary voxelization of the overlap region. Consequently, we can handle collisions with arbitrary animated geometry. Our approach runs entirely on the GPU, avoiding costly CPU-GPU memory transfer and exploiting the GPU’s computational power. Surfaces are rendered with the hardware tessellation unit, allowing for adaptively-rendered, high-frequency surface detail. Ultimately, our algorithm enables fine-scale surface deformations from geometry impact with very little computational overhead, running well below a millisecond even in complex scenes. As our results demonstrate, our approach is ideally suited to many real-time applications such as video games and authoring tools