Normal mapping for surfel-based rendering

Abstract

On the one hand normal mapping is a common technique to improve normal interpolation of low tesselated triangle meshes for a realistic lighting. On the other hand today’s graphics hardware allows texturing of view plane aligned point primitives. In this paper we illustrate how to use textured points together with normal mapping to increase surfel splatting quality, especially when using larger splats on lower level of detail. In combination with a silhouette refinement this results in a significant decimation of needed surfels with small visual disadvantages only. Furthermore, we explain how to create a normal map for points within a point hierarchy.