Note: This blog has previously been published on www.tacton.com. The author is Marco Lang, Tacton’s Senior Visualization Product Manager. Marco has more than 10 years’ experience working with visual asset creation, and configuration at Lumo Graphics, and now Tacton. In case you missed it check out the first installment of Visual Asset Creation here.
Optimizing visual asset creation a definition
Optimization refers to the process of finding a trade-off between Visual Fidelity, download speed and Rendering performance.
The CNC machine tools that create the tooling for final products work from these accurate, smooth NURBS data.
Since the direct evaluation of NURBS surfaces on the GPU is a highly complex and computationally intensive task, they are usually converted in simpler surface descriptions and tessellated on the CPU (Central Processing Unit) as a pre–processing step. Afterward, the set of generated triangles is sent to the GPU.
The resource demands (CPU, GPU, Memory) to execute a dynamic re-tessellation at every frame on top of all other relevant tasks necessary for an interactive real-time visualization are simply too much for an average consumer device. Therefore, tessellation is not done on the fly while the 3D real-time visualization is running, it is done as a pre-process upfront.
(Images of a teapot with different tessellation versions)
Part 3: Optimizing Visual Asset Creation will be available in a few weeks.