Point Splatting Based on Translucent Shadow Mapping and Hierarchical Bucket Sorting

Abstract

In this paper we present our solution for shadow generation, visibility sorting and GPU based shading of translucent point data for point based rendering. Our Translucent Shadow Mapping Algorithm uses a spherical coordinate system and solves the distancebased sorting, transparency calculation, shadow mapping, omni-directional mapping and light intensity attenuation problems in one step. We also propose a novel algorithm for visibility sorting of unstructured point data using the Hierarchical Bucket Sorting approach. This algorithm uses less memory and produces precise back-to-front ordered slices compared to previous methods. Finally, the shading calculations are performed in the GPU, using the rendering-oriented attributes of the point splats. Furthermore, we demonstrate the efficiency and flexibility of our novel approach of point splatting by showing several rendering results for visualizing mixed 3D data sets