Rendering chamfering structures of sharp edges

Abstract

In most realtime applications such as 3D games, in order to reduce the complexity of the scene being rendered, objects are often made by simple and large primitives. Thus, the phenomenon of edge highlighting, which would require chamfering structures made by lots of small patches at the seaming, is absent and is often faked by “highlights” drawn on the texture. We proposed a realistic realtime rendering procedure for highlighting chamfering structures, or rounded edges, by considering specified edges as thin cylinders and obtained the intensity via integration. We derived a brief approximated formula generalized from Blinn’s shadow model, and used a precomputed integration table to accelerate the render speed and reduce resources needed. The algorithm is implemented with shader language, and can be considered as a post-process on original result. Evaluation shows that the effect on rendering speed is limited even for scenes with large scale of vertices.