Real-Time Offset Surfaces Real-Time Offset Surfaces

We present a novel technique for the direct rendering of offset surfaces for polygonal meshes. The visible part of the offset surface of each triangle, defined as the union of three spheres, three cylinders and a prism, is constructed in a shader program utilizing the geometry shader. Our method creates exact offset surfaces, up to pixel resolution. Possible applications are real-time visualization of offset surfaces, e.g. for GPU-based collision detection or conservative voxelization and rasterization of complex triangle meshes.