Real-time GPU-Based Voxelization and Applications

Abstract

This paper proposes a new real-time voxelization algorithm using newly available GPU functionalities. Our voxelization algorithm is efficient and able to real-time transform a highly complex surface-represented scene into a set of high-resolution voxels in only one GPU pass using the newly available geometry shader. The usage of 3D texture allows our algorithm to record the existence, color and normal information in a voxel directly without specific encoding and decoding mechanism. This allows us to adjust the voxel resolution according to hardware limitation and the need of applications without strenuous modifications to the encoding and decoding scheme. At the same time extra surfacial and volumetric information also allows us to render more realistic lighting effects. This paper demonstrates the usage of our voxelization results in rendering transparent shadow, transmittance and refraction. The results show that our algorithm can voxelize deformable models and render those complex lighting effects in real time without any preprocessing step.