Progressive Blue Surfels

Abstract: In this paper we describe a new technique to generate and use surfels for rendering of highly complex, polygonal 3D scenes in real time. The basic idea is to approximate complex parts of the scene by rendering a set of points (surfels). The points are computed in a preprocessing step and offer two important properties: They are placed only on the visible surface of the scene's geometry and they are distributed and sorted in such a way, that every prefix of points is a good visual representation of the approximated part of the scene. An early evaluation of the method shows that it is capable of rendering scenes consisting of several billions of triangles with high image quality.