Direct Pixel-Accurate Rendering of Smooth Surfaces

High-quality rendering of B-spline surfaces is important for a range of applications. Providing interactive rendering with guaranteed quality gives the user not only visually pleasing images, but also trustworthy information about the model. In this paper we present a view-dependent error estimate for parametric surfaces. This estimate forms the basis of our surface rendering algorithm, which makes use of the hardware tessellator functionality of GPUs. We use the screen space distance between the tessellated surface and the corresponding surface point as an error metric. This makes the algorithm particularly useful when visualizing additional attributes attached to the surface. An example of this is isogeometric analysis, in which simulation results are visualized along with the surface.