View-space meta-ball approximation by depth-independent accumulative fields

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to fast rendering realistic meta-balls in view space. Meta-ball rendering is widely used in computer graphics to represent liquid drops, and especially important to particle-based fluid dynamics for the rendering on the final stage. Traditionally, meta-balls are procedurally modeled in object space according to implicit surface extraction and rendered as meshes. Instead of such consuming geometry-based methods, our algorithm is executed at screen-space level, and it utilizes the features of GPU, which demands low overheads and thus is much faster. Compared with other screen-space methods of particle rendering, our method obeys the basic principle of implicit surface. Consequently, real-time meta-ball rendering can be achieved very efficiently in a significantly high quality.