Volumetric Surfaces: Representing Fuzzy Geometries with Multiple Meshes

Abstract

High-quality real-time view synthesis methods are based on volume rendering, splatting, or surface rendering. While surface-based methods generally are the fastest, they cannot faithfully model fuzzy geometry like hair. In turn, alpha-blending techniques excel at representing fuzzy materials but require an unbounded number of samples per ray (P1). Further overheads are induced by empty space skipping in volume rendering (P2) and sorting input primitives in splatting (P3). These problems are exacerbated on low-performance graphics hardware, e.g. on mobile devices. We present a novel representation for real-time view synthesis where the (P1) number of sampling locations is small and bounded, (P2) sampling locations are efficiently found via rasterization, and (P3) rendering is sorting-free. We achieve this by representing objects as semi-transparent multi-layer meshes, rendered in fixed layer order from outermost to innermost. We model mesh layers as SDF shells with optimal spacing learned during training. After baking, we fit UV textures to the corresponding meshes. We show that our method can represent challenging fuzzy objects while achieving higher frame rates than volume-based and splatting-based methods on low-end and mobile devices.