Analytic Displacement Mapping using Hardware Tessellation
Matthias Nießner1     Charles Loop2    
    1Technical University of Munich     2Microsoft Research
ACM Transactions on Graphics 2013 (TOG)
Abstract

Displacement mapping is ideal for modern GPUs since it enables high-frequency geometric surface detail on models with low memory I/O. However, problems such as texture seams, normal re-computation, and under-sampling artifacts have limited its adoption. We provide a comprehensive solution to these problems by introducing a smooth analytic displacement function. Coefficients are stored in a GPU-friendly tile based texture format, and a multi-resolution mip hierarchy of this function is formed. We propose a novel level-of-detail scheme by computing per vertex adaptive tessellation factors and select the appropriate pre-filtered mip levels of the displacement function. Our method obviates the need for a pre-computed normal map since normals are directly derived from the displacements. Thus, we are able to perform authoring and rendering simultaneously without typical displacement map extraction from a dense triangle mesh. This not only is more flexible than the traditional combination of discrete displacements and normal maps, but also provides faster runtime due to reduced memory I/O.