TY - JOUR
T1 - Meshlets and How to Shade Them
T2 - A Study on Texture-Space Shading
AU - Neff, T.
AU - Mueller, J. H.
AU - Steinberger, M.
AU - Schmalstieg, D.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Author(s) Computer Graphics Forum © 2022 The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
PY - 2022/5
Y1 - 2022/5
N2 - Commonly used image-space layouts of shading points, such as used in deferred shading, are strictly view-dependent, which restricts efficient caching and temporal amortization. In contrast, texture-space layouts can represent shading on all surface points and can be tailored to the needs of a particular application. However, the best grouping of shading points—which we call a shading unit—in texture space remains unclear. Choices of shading unit granularity (how many primitives or pixels per unit) and in shading unit parametrization (how to assign texture coordinates to shading points) lead to different outcomes in terms of final image quality, overshading cost, and memory consumption. Among the possible choices, shading units consisting of larger groups of scene primitives, so-called meshlets, remain unexplored as of yet. In this paper, we introduce a taxonomy for analyzing existing texture-space shading methods based on the group size and parametrization of shading units. Furthermore, we introduce a novel texture-space layout strategy that operates on large shading units: the meshlet shading atlas. We experimentally demonstrate that the meshlet shading atlas outperforms previous approaches in terms of image quality, run-time performance and temporal upsampling for a given number of fragment shader invocations. The meshlet shading atlas lends itself to work together with popular cluster-based rendering of meshes with high geometric detail.
AB - Commonly used image-space layouts of shading points, such as used in deferred shading, are strictly view-dependent, which restricts efficient caching and temporal amortization. In contrast, texture-space layouts can represent shading on all surface points and can be tailored to the needs of a particular application. However, the best grouping of shading points—which we call a shading unit—in texture space remains unclear. Choices of shading unit granularity (how many primitives or pixels per unit) and in shading unit parametrization (how to assign texture coordinates to shading points) lead to different outcomes in terms of final image quality, overshading cost, and memory consumption. Among the possible choices, shading units consisting of larger groups of scene primitives, so-called meshlets, remain unexplored as of yet. In this paper, we introduce a taxonomy for analyzing existing texture-space shading methods based on the group size and parametrization of shading units. Furthermore, we introduce a novel texture-space layout strategy that operates on large shading units: the meshlet shading atlas. We experimentally demonstrate that the meshlet shading atlas outperforms previous approaches in terms of image quality, run-time performance and temporal upsampling for a given number of fragment shader invocations. The meshlet shading atlas lends itself to work together with popular cluster-based rendering of meshes with high geometric detail.
KW - CCS Concepts
KW - Texturing
KW - • Computing methodologies → Rendering
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85130597650&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/cgf.14474
DO - 10.1111/cgf.14474
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85130597650
SN - 0167-7055
VL - 41
SP - 277
EP - 287
JO - Computer Graphics Forum
JF - Computer Graphics Forum
IS - 2
ER -