Real-Time Tessellation A Region of Interest Based Technique Suited for Game Applications

Abstract: While the games industry grows, the need for visually appealing graphics increase. This drives the demand for new hardware and the development of new techniques forward. With the latest generation of 3D graphic APIs the new rendering pipeline technique tessellation was announced. With each generation of games getting more advanced, the demand for highly detailed models increase. This leads to a higher workload for the GPU. The purpose of this thesis is to research the field of tessellation and develop a prototype to optimize the tessellation pipeline. The prototype is designed to help reduce the number of generated triangles by dividing the mesh into regions, each region with its own tessellation factor. The prototype implementation supports both manual and automatic generation of these regions. A new file format was developed to support the region data. The implementation was split into three parts; one Python based Maya plug-in used for preparing the model for exporting, one exporter for Maya that generated the output file, and one viewer application capable of rendering the resulting mesh. The geometry output of the proposed technique was evaluated by comparing it to uniformly tessellated reference mesh geometry. Measurements show that the proposed technique is capable of reducing the face count with minor or maintained correlation to the reference geometry.