Abstract
Surfel is an important representation for point-based graphics because of the high-quality rendering it enables. In this work, we present three modifications to surfels to make it more memory efficient and easier to render using modern graphics hardware. First, we assign surfels to LDC faces based on the normal vectors. It removes the need for 3-to-1 reduction while maintaining the same image quality, thus making LDC more memory efficient. Second, we modify object-space EWA surface splatting to utilize the multisampling and texture filtering features of modern graphics hardware. It removes the step of warping a low-pass filter to object space from the process of object-space EWA surface splatting. Third, we propose to calculate the filter weight bi-linearly instead of using Euclidean distances. The filter weights in X and Y directions are computed in 1D separately and then multiplied together. It makes the summation of filter weights approximate a partition of unity more closely, thus reduces the artifacts in absence of per-surfel or per-pixel normalization.