Displacement modeling: Hardware-accelerated interactive feature modeling on subdivision surfaces

Feature modeling on subdivision surfaces remains a challenging task for interactive 3D design. This paper presents the idea of displacement modeling, which utilizes displacement mapping as an interactive modeling method to design fine level features by exploiting the computation power of modern programmable graphics hardware (GPU). We also propose a view-dependent adaptive subdivision method according to the error metric in view space. It can highly reduce the number of refined faces and points while maintaining the same visual quality as uniform subdivision. Furthermore, several feature adjustment tools are introduced for flexible design and manipulation of created features. Since the displacement modeling approach is fully implemented on graphics hardware, it can substantially alleviate the computing load on CPU and significantly reduce the data transmission on the graphics channel.