Real-time Rendering of Animated Meshless Representation

Meshless representations, such as implicit representations (Signed Distance Fields, procedural density fields, etc.) and 3D textures, are important representations in Computer Graphics. Implicit representation allows the representation of geometry with an infinite resolution and a low memory cost. 3D textures are an explicit representation that can store shape information in a regular 3D grid of voxels, allowing for simple anti-aliasing, mipmapping, and dynamic editing. Recent works have improved both representations' rendering performances, making them viable for real-time rendering. However, their animation remains a tedious task, limiting their adoption. In this work, we propose a data structure and a rendering pipeline that allows for animating meshless geometric representations. To achieve that, we encase the meshless representations into a coarse tetrahedral mesh, rigged as we would have for a typical articulated character. At rendering time, we apply the deformation of the rest pose to the full volume using interval shading [Tri24]. Our method can be directly integrated into a classical rasterization-based rendering pipeline, allowing for the real-time animation of meshless representations using pre-existing animation software.