Efficient rendering of deformable objects for real-time applications

Deformable objects can be used to model soft objects such as clothing, human faces and animal characters. They are important as they can improve the realism of the applications. However, most existing hardware accelerators cannot render deformable objects directly. A tessellation process is often used to convert a deformable object into polygons so that the hardware graphics accelerator may render them. Unfortunately, this tessellation process is computationally very expensive. While the object is deforming, the tessellation process needs to be performed repeatedly to convert the deforming objects into polygons. As a result, deformable objects are seldom used in real-time applications such as virtual environments and computer games. Since trimmed NURBS surfaces are often used to represent deformable objects, in this paper we present an efficient method for incremental rendering of deformable trimmed NURBS surfaces. A trimmed NURBS surface typically deforms through the deformation of the trimmed NURBS surface and/or the trimming curve. Our method handles both trimmed surface deformation as well as trimming curve deformation. Experimental results show that our method performs significantly faster than the method used in OpenGL and can be used in real-time applications, such as computer games. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.