Out-of-Core Construction of Sparse Voxel Octrees

Note

An extended version of this article appeared in Computer Graphics Forum in 2014. The article describes significant performance improvements (through better voxelization and morton code generation), a more in-depth explanation of the SVO building algorithm, a new example on how to sample additional mesh properties (normals, colors, ...) and various other additions.

Abstract

Voxel-based rendering has recently received significant attention due to its potential in the context of efficiently rendering massively large and highly detailed scenes. Unfortunately, few or no scenes are available in the form of sparse voxel octrees. In this paper, we present an out-of-core algorithm for constructing a sparse voxel octree from a triangle mesh. Our algorithm allows the input triangle mesh, the output sparse voxel octree, and, most importantly, the intermediate high-resolution 3D voxel grid, to be larger than available memory. We demonstrate that our out-of-core algorithm can construct sparse voxel octrees from triangle meshes using only a fraction of the memory required by an in-core algorithm in roughly the same time, and that our out-of-core algorithm can also handle extremely large triangle meshes.

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