This repository provides the source code for the Siggraph 2023 paper Micro-Mesh Construction by Andrea Maggiordomo, Henry Moreton and Marco Tarini.
Micro-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 Micro-Mesh ray-tracing, that leverages a self-bounding, compressed displacement mapping scheme to achieve these efficiencies.
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. 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.
@article{micromesh-construction,
author = {Maggiordomo, Andrea and Moreton, Henry and Tarini, Marco},
title = {Micro-Mesh Construction},
year = {2023},
issue_date = {August 2023},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
volume = {42},
number = {4},
issn = {0730-0301},
doi = {10.1145/3592440},
journal = {ACM Trans. Graph.},
month = {jul},
articleno = {121},
numpages = {18}
}
This project has a few external dependencies. To get them, either clone the repository and the submodules with git clone --recurse-submodules ..., or simply clone the repository and let CMake fetch the dependencies when configuring and generating build files.
When building on Linux there are additional dependencies on the X.org and GTK3 development libraries that must be installed before building GLFW and nativefiledialog. On Ubuntu 22.04, this is done with
sudo apt install xorg-dev libgtk-3-dev
Build and install the project files with CMake, either with an IDE that support CMake projects or from the command line.
From the command line:
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build . -j 8
cmake --install . --prefix INSTALL_PATH
This creates a bin folder in INSTALL_PATH which contains the following project tools:
This tool converts existing standard meshes into Micro-Meshes. It can be run interactively from a GUI or headless from the command line; for further information see the MeshReduce readme.
This is a Micro-Mesh previewer that can be used to inspect Micro-Mesh data.
This tool transfers copies vertex attributes from a mesh to another, and can be used to transfer attributes to a base mesh (e.g., generate the UVs for the base mesh with an external tool, and transfer those to the Micro-Mesh data).
This tool performs UV optimization to reduce the distortion of the displaced Micro-Mesh surface.
This tool bakes color and (tangent-space) normal textures for a given Micro-Mesh. Requires per-vertex UVs, normals and tangents.
This project is released under Apache 2.0.
This projects depends on third-party open-source libraries collected in the ext subdirectory. License files are provided in ext/license.
We thank Christoph Kubisch for sharing his cgltf fork that supports NVIDIA's MicroMap-related glTF extensions.