Hardware rendering of 3D geometry with elevation maps

We present a generic framework for realtime rendering of 3D surfaces. We use the common elevation map prim-itive, by which a given surface is decomposed into a set of patches. Each patch is parameterized as an elevation map over a planar domain and resampled on a regular grid. While current hardware accelerated rendering approaches require conversion of this representation back into a trian-gle mesh or point set, we propose to render the elevation maps directly in a hardware accelerated environment. We use one base data set to render each patch in the common vertex and fragment shader pipeline. We implement mesh-or point-based rendering by using a base mesh or a base point set respectively. This provides the basis for the under-lying primitive for the final rendering. We show the bene-fits of this method for splat rendering by replacing attribute blending through a simplified and fast attribute interpola-tion. This results in rendering acceleration as well as an improvement in visual quality when compared to previous approaches.