Optimized Pattern-Based Adaptive Mesh Refinement Using GPU

The high performance of GPUs and the increasing use of their programming mechanisms have fostered the development of graphics applications that better exploit the raw power of these devices to achieve higher levels of realism. Silhouette refinement, as one of the techniques that help to improve realism, has profited from GPUs´ advances in recent years. In this paper, we present a method for triangular mesh refinement which alleviates the problem of rugged silhouettes. We demonstrate that, through a clever indexing scheme, our method is able to use adaptive patterns in an optimized way, taking full advantage of the GPU´s parallelism. The ideas we used were adapted from distinct previous works, but our method presents astounding performance gains. Also, our method works very well with existing meshes, therefore, it can improve the visual appearance of existing models without mesh redesign.