Volumetric Surfaces: Representing Fuzzy Geometries with Layered Meshes
This addresses the challenge of efficiently rendering fuzzy objects in real-time applications, such as on laptops and smartphones, though it appears incremental by building on existing surface and volume rendering techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of real-time view synthesis for fuzzy geometries like hair, which existing surface rendering methods struggle with, by introducing a novel representation using semi-transparent multi-layer meshes, achieving real-time rendering on low-power devices.
High-quality view synthesis relies on volume rendering, splatting, or surface rendering. While surface rendering is typically the fastest, it struggles to accurately model fuzzy geometry like hair. In turn, alpha-blending techniques excel at representing fuzzy materials but require an unbounded number of samples per ray (P1). Further overheads are induced by empty space skipping in volume rendering (P2) and sorting input primitives in splatting (P3). We present a novel representation for real-time view synthesis where the (P1) number of sampling locations is small and bounded, (P2) sampling locations are efficiently found via rasterization, and (P3) rendering is sorting-free. We achieve this by representing objects as semi-transparent multi-layer meshes rendered in a fixed order. First, we model surface layers as signed distance function (SDF) shells with optimal spacing learned during training. Then, we bake them as meshes and fit UV textures. Unlike single-surface methods, our multi-layer representation effectively models fuzzy objects. In contrast to volume and splatting-based methods, our approach enables real-time rendering on low-power laptops and smartphones.