Texel Splatting: Perspective-Stable 3D Pixel Art
This addresses a specific challenge in 3D graphics for pixel art rendering, offering a novel solution to perspective instability, though it has limitations like disocclusion at probe boundaries.
The paper tackles the problem of rendering 3D scenes as pixel art with perspective projection, where existing grid-snapping methods fail due to pixel drift at different depths, and introduces texel splatting to achieve perspective-stable rendering by using a cubemap and world-space quads.
Rendering 3D scenes as pixel art requires that discrete pixels remain stable as the camera moves. Existing methods snap the camera to a grid. Under orthographic projection, this works: every pixel shifts by the same amount, and a single snap corrects all of them. Perspective breaks this. Pixels at different depths drift at different rates, and no single snap corrects all depths. Texel splatting avoids this entirely. Scene geometry is rendered into a cubemap from a fixed point in the world, and each texel is splatted to the screen as a world-space quad. Cubemap indexing gives rotation invariance. Grid-snapping the origin gives translation invariance. The primary limitation is that a fixed origin cannot see all geometry; disocclusion at probe boundaries remains an open tradeoff.