Z‐Thickness Blending: Effective Fragment Merging for Multi‐Fragment Rendering

Abstract

An effective fragment merging technique is presented in this study that addresses multi‐fragment problems, including fragment overflow and z‐fighting, and provides visual effects that are beneficial for various screen‐space rendering algorithms. The proposed method merges locally adjacent fragments along the viewing direction to resolve the aforementioned problems based on cost‐effective multi‐layer representation and coplanar blending. We introduce a z‐thickness model based on the radiosity spreading from the viewing z‐direction. Moreover, we present the fragment‐merging schemes and rules for determining the visibility of the merged fragments based on the proposed z‐thickness model. The proposed method is targeted at multi‐fragment rendering that handles individual fragments (e.g., k‐buffer) instead of representing the fragments as an approximated transmittance function. In addition, our method provides a smooth visibility transition across overlapping fragments, resulting in visual advantages in various visualization applications. In this paper, we demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method through several screen‐space rendering applications.

Hashed, binned A-buffer for real-time outlier removal and rendering of noisy point clouds

“…A more memory-efficient variant of the A-buffer is the k-buffer, which only stores the k best, e.g., closest fragments [1,17] per pixel. Kim et al [19] proposed an A-buffer compatible k-buffer variant for fragment merging for orderindependent transparency. This approach, however, either stores a complete list of fragments and sorts the fragments for merging, which requires a lot of memory, or maintains a sorted list of fragments and inserts/merges new incoming fragments.…”