Differentiable Micro-Mesh Construction
Authors: Yishun Dou, Zhong Zheng, Qiaoqiao Jin, Rui Shi, Yuhan Li, Bingbing Ni

Micro-mesh (u-mesh) is a new graphics primitive for compact representation of extreme geometry consisting of a low-polygon base mesh enriched by per micro-vertex displacement. A new generation of GPUs supports this structure with hardware evolution on u-mesh ray tracing achieving real-time rendering in pixel level geometric details. In this article we present a differentiable framework to convert standard meshes into this efficient format offering a holistic scheme in contrast to the previous stage-based methods. In our construction context a u-mesh is defined where each base triangle is a parametric primitive which is then reparameterized with Laplacian operators for efficient geometry optimization. Our framework offers numerous advantages for high-quality u-mesh production: (i) end-to-end geometry optimization and displacement baking; (ii) enabling the differentiation of renderings with respect to umesh for faithful reprojectability; (iii) high scalability for integrating useful features for u-mesh production and rendering such as minimizing shell volume maintaining the isotropy of the base mesh and visual-guided adaptive level of detail. Extensive experiments on u-mesh construction for a large set of high-resolution meshes demonstrate the superior quality achieved by the proposed scheme.