Parallel smoothing of quad meshes
For use in real-time applications, we present a fast algorithm for converting a quad mesh to a smooth, piecewise polynomial surface on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). The surface has well-defined normals everywhere and closely mimics the shape of Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces. It consists of bicubic splines wherever possible, and a new class of patches-c-patches-where a vertex has a valence different from 4. The algorithm fits well into parallel streams so that meshes with 12,000 input quads, of which 60% have one or more non-4-valent vertices, are converted, evaluated and rendered with 9x9 resolution per quad at 50 frames per second. The GPU computations are ordered so that evaluation avoids pixel dropout.
gpu subdivision smooth surface quadrilateral mesh