Fast and simple hardware accelerated voxelizations using simplicial coverings

Abstract

Voxelization of solids, that is the representation of a solid by a set of voxels that approximates it, is an operation with important applications in fields like solid modeling, physical simulation or volume graphics. Moreover, the new generation of affordable 3D raster displays has renewed the interest on fast voxelization algorithms, as the scan-conversion of a solid is a basic operation on these devices. In this paper a hardware accelerated method for computing a voxelization of a polyhedron is presented. The algorithm is simple, efficient, robust and handles any kind of polyhedron (self-intersecting, with or without holes, manifold or non-manifold). Three different implementations are described in detail. The first is a conventional implementation in the CPU, the second is a hardware accelerated implementation that uses standard OpenGL primitives, and the third exploits the capabilities of modern GPUs by using vertex programs.