Efficient trimmed NURBS tessellation

Ákos Balázs, Michael Guthe, Reinhard Klein
University of Bonn
Institute of Computer Science II.
Römerstraße 164, D-53121 Bonn
Germany

Abstract

Interactive rendering of trimmed NURBS models is of great importance for CAD systems. For this the model needs to be transformed into a polygonal representation. This transformation can be either performed in a preprocessing step, at the cost of losing the capability to edit the surfaces, or on the fly during rendering. Since the number of frames per second is usually critical, efficient on the fly tessellation of trimmed NURBS surfaces is still essential for interactive rendering and editing of such models.

In this paper we present an efficient – with respect to both runtime and to the number of generated triangles – tessellation algorithm for trimmed NURBS surfaces that is capable of guaranteeing a specified geometric approximation error. When affordable by the subsequent steps in the pipeline, an approximate error of the tessella-tion can also be used leading to fewer triangles.