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COMPUTER GRAPHICS & GEOMETRY

Issue Year: 2007
Date: Spring
Volume: 9
Number: 1
Pages: 18-49

Article Name: MARCHINGPARTICLES: FAST GENERATION OF PARTICLES FOR THE SAMPLING OF IMPLICIT SURFACES
Author: F. Levet (France), X. Granier (France), C. Schlick (France)
Address: F. Levet
levet@labri.fr
IPARLA project (INRIA futurs - LaBRI)
UMR 5800, Universite Bordeaux 1
351, cours de la Liberation
33405 Talence, France
 
X. Granier
granier@labri.fr
IPARLA project (INRIA futurs - LaBRI)
UMR 5800, Universite Bordeaux 1
351, cours de la Liberation
33405 Talence, France
 
C. Schlick
schlick@labri.fr
IPARLA project (INRIA futurs - LaBRI)
UMR 5800, Universite Bordeaux 1
351, cours de la Liberation
33405 Talence, France
Abstract:

Particle systems, as originally proposed by Witkin and Heckbert [32], are a powerful way to sample implicit surfaces since they generate almost evenly distributed samples over the surface, thanks to a global minimization of an energy criterion. Nonetheless, due to the computational cost of the relaxation process, the sampling process becomes rather expensive when the number of samples exceeds a few thousands.
In this paper, we propose a technique that only relies on a pure geometry processing which enables us to rapidly generate the set of final particles (e.g. half a second to generate 5,000 particles for an analytic implicit surface) with near-optimal positions. Because of its characteristics, the technique does not need the usual split-and-death criterion anymore and only about ten relaxation steps are necessary to get a high quality sampling. Either uniform or non-uniform sampling can be performed with our technique.

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