Smooth Particle Ribbons Through Hardware Accelerated Tessellation

Sammanfattning: Generating and rendering ribbons from a stream of particles is common in games and VFX to visualize flow. To create detailed smooth particle ribbons this work combines tessellation and B-splines, which gives smooth surfaces with contiguous normals. The traditional pipeline for doing hardware tessellation with hull- and domain shaders is limited to a maximum tessellation level, which limits how much detail a ribbon can get. In Nvidia’s Turing architecture, mesh- and task shaders were introduced, which provide support for tessellating geometry while not having any constraints on the amount of geometry that can be generated. This work evaluates three implementations for generating and drawing smooth particle ribbons by measuring performance in terms of execution time. The implementations are based on mesh shaders, mesh + task shaders and the traditional pipeline. In turn, three optimizations are proposed. The optimizations evaluated are adaptive level of detail, culling and Gouraud shading. The results show that the traditional pipeline is faster than using mesh shader based tessellation up to its maximum tessellation factor. For larger tessellation factors, when combining adaptive LOD, culling and Gouraud shading, mesh and task shaders combined can generate ribbons at higher quality than the traditional tessellation pipeline, with comparable performance.