Volumetric Billboards

@article{Decaudin:2009:VB,
  title     = "Volumetric Billboards",
  author    = "Philippe Decaudin and Fabrice Neyret",
  journal   = "Computer Graphics Forum",
  volume    = "28",
  number    = "8",
  pages     = "2079--2089",
  year      = "2009",
  keywords  = "image-based rendering, billboards, real-time rendering, GPU, geometry shader",
  url       = "http://phildec.users.sf.net/Research/VolBlbCGF09.php"
}

This paper presents an image-based representation, called volumetric billboards, allowing for the real-time rendering of semi-transparent and visually complex objects arbitrarily distributed in a 3D scene. The representation offers full parallax effect from any viewing direction and improved anti-aliasing of distant objects. It correctly handles transparency between multiple and possibly overlapping objects without requiring any primitive sorting. Furthermore, volumetric billboards can be easily integrated into common rasterization-based renderers, which allows for their concurrent use with polygonal models and standard rendering techniques such as shadow-mapping.

The representation is based on volumetric images of the objects and on a dedicated real-time volume rendering algorithm that takes advantage of the GPU geometry shader. Examples demonstrate the applicability of the method in many cases including levels-of-detail representation for multiple intersecting complex objects, volumetric textures, animated objects and construction of high-resolution objects by assembling instances of low-resolution volumetric billboards.

Keywords: image-based rendering, billboards, real-time rendering, GPU, geometry shader.

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