Fracture-aware Tessellation of Subdivision Surfaces

BSTRACT We introduce a new tessellation algorithm for production rendering of fractured subdivision surfaces that produces higher quality results with less distortion than previous approaches. Our tessellator is provided with a fractured subdivision control mesh along with the corresponding unfractured mesh. We use the unfractured mesh to evaluate limit positions of the fractured mesh vertices before tessellation, and we apply displacements at this time. During tessellation, we iteratively split edges, evaluating displaced limit positions at added points. Additionally, we measure deformations that were performed during the fracture process and apply these during tessellation to allow effects like animated crack spreading. Our approach produces seamless results with no distortion of the unfractured surface, and enables a more efficient fracture pipeline.