Fabiano Romeiro Harvard University Hardware-Assisted CSG Rendering

One of the most intuitive ways to model solid objects is by constructing them hierarchically, through combinations of simpler objects. Several representations that incorporate this paradigm exist, of which CSG is the most popular. In the CSG representation, solid objects are obtained by successive boolean combinations of primitives, and are represented by the expression corresponding to the sequence of boolean operations of primitives that led to them. These CSG expressions are stored as trees called CSG trees, whose leaves represent primitives and nodes represent boolean operations. The CSG paradigm is well suited for modeling, but much more useful if interactivity can be achieved, as then models can be modified in realtime, greatly facilitating the design process. Since CSG’s introduction, several approaches have been devised towards achieving that goal on ever more comple