Section: New Results

Hash-based CSG Evaluation on GPU

Participants : Cédric Zanni, Sylvain Lefebvre.

We have developed a new evaluation scheme for Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) modeling that is well adapted to modern GPUs. The approach falls into the category of screen space techniques and can handle a large range of geometric representations. The proposed method relies on the idea of hashing in order to reduce the memory footprint for the processing of a given ray in the scene (e.g., for discovering which part of the space is within or outside the object) while allowing the evaluation of the CSG in amortized constant time. This memory reduction in turn allows the space to be subdivided in order to apply progressively the rendering algorithm, ensuring that required data fit in the graphic memory. This improvement over previous approaches allows us to handle objects of higher complexity during both modeling and slicing for additive manufacturing.

The work was presented at the 2018 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games conference and published in the ACM journal Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques [15]. It was then integrated in the current version of our software IceSL.