Incremental rendering of deformable trimmed NURBS surfaces

Trimmed NURBS surfaces are often used to model smooth and complex objects. Unfortunately, most existing hardware graphics accelerators cannot render them directly. Although there are a lot of methods proposed to accelerate the rendering of such surfaces, majority of them are based on tessellation, which is developed primarily for handling non-deforming objects. For an object that may deform in run-time, such as clothing, facial expression, human and animal character, the tessellation process will need to be performed repeatedly while the object is deforming. However, as the tessellation process is very time consuming, interactive display of deforming objects is difficult. This explains why deformable objects are rarely used in virtual reality applications. In this paper, we present a efficient method for incremental rendering of deformable trimmed NURBS surfaces. This method can handle both trimmed surface deformation and trimming curve deformation. Experimental results show that our method performs significantly faster than the method used in OpenGL.