Optimizing Surface Voxelization for Triangular Meshes with Equidistant Scanlines and Gap Detection

Abstract This paper presents an efficient algorithm for voxelizing the surface of triangular meshes in a single compute pass. The algorithm uses parallel equidistant lines to traverse the interior of triangles, minimizing costly memory operations and avoiding visiting the same voxels multiple times. By detecting and visiting only the voxels in each line operation, the proposed method achieves better performance results. This method incorporates a gap detection step, targeting areas where scanline‐based voxelization methods might fail. By selectively addressing these gaps, our method attains superior performance outcomes. Additionally, the algorithm is written entirely in a single compute GLSL shader, which makes it highly portable and vendor independent. Its simplicity also makes it easy to adapt and extend for various applications. The paper compares the results of this algorithm with other modern methods, comprehensibly comparing the time performance and resources used. Additionally, we introduce a novel metric, the ‘Slope Consistency Value’, which quantifies triangle orientation's impact on voxelization accuracy for scanline‐based approaches. The results show that the proposed solution outperforms existing, modern ones and obtains better results, especially in densely populated scenes with homogeneous triangle sizes and at higher resolutions.