Real-time Local Displacement using Dynamic GPU Memory Management

We propose a novel method for local displacement events in large scenes, such as scratches, footsteps, or sculpting operations. Deformations are stored as displacements for vertices generated by hardware tessellation. Adaptive mesh refinement, application of the displacement and all involved memory management happen completely on the GPU. We show various extensions to our approach, such as on-the-fly normal computation and multi-resolution editing. In typical game scenes we perform local deformations at arbitrary positions in far less than one millisecond. This makes the method particularly suited for games and interactive sculpting applications.