Micro-Mesh Construction

Micro-meshes (mu-meshes) are a new structured graphics primitive supporting a large increase in geometric fidelity, without commensurate memory and run-time processing costs, consisting of a base mesh enriched by a displacement map. A new generation of GPUs supports this structure with native hardware mu-mesh ray-tracing, that leverages a self-bounding, compressed displacement mapping scheme to achieve these efficiencies. In this paper, we present an automatic method to convert an existing multi-million triangle mesh into this compact format, unlocking the advantages of the data representation for a large number of scenarios. We identify the requirements for high-quality mu-meshes, and show how existing re-meshing and displacement-map baking tools are ill-suited for their generation. Our method is based on a simplification scheme tailored to the generation of high-quality base meshes, optimized for tessellation and displacement sampling, in conjunction with algorithms for determining displacement vectors to control the direction and range of displacements. We also explore the optimization of mu-meshes for texture maps and the representation of boundaries. We demonstrate our method with extensive batch processing, converting an existing collection of high-resolution scanned models to the micro-mesh representation, providing an open-source reference implementation, and, as additional material, the data and an inspection tool.