A paper appearing in the January 2006 issue of the ACM Transactions on Graphics journal.
(Paper was conditionally accepted by the SIGGRAPH 2005 paper committee but it required major changes.)

Hierarchical RLE Level Set
A Compact and Versatile Deformable Surface Representation

Ben Houston Michael Bang Nielsen Christopher Batty Ola Nilsson Ken Museth
Exocortex Technologies, Inc University of Arhus Frantic Films Link�ping Institute of Tech.

General Website Navigation:
► Ben Houston's Homepage

Other SIGGRAPH / ACM TOG sketches & publications:
 ► Visual Simulation of Wispy Smoke - A particle-based and multi-resolution approach (SIGGRAPH 2005)
 ► Gigantic Deformable Surfaces - a novel level set data structure combining DT-Grid and RLE features (SIGGRAPH 2005)
► The Tar Monster - creating a character with fluid simulation (SIGGRAPH 2004)
 ► RLE Sparse Level Sets - a fast and scalable implicit surface representation (SIGGRAPH 2004)
► Modeling Complex Occlusions in Fluid Simulations - a unified level set-based approach (SIGGRAPH 2003) >
► Clara.io: Online 3D editor (another of my projects)

In this sketch, we introduce the Hierarchical RLE Level Set (also known briefly as the Compact RLE level set.) This representation is new structure that combines the benefits of the two
previously presented sparse regular level set representations: the versatile RLE Sparse Level Set (of Houston et al. [2004]) and the near-optimally efficient DT-Grid (of Nielsen and Museth 2005]). We then present many important applications for computer graphics.

The Hierarchical RLE Level Set offers a favorable combination of efficiency, scalability and versatility that is well suited to the needs of level set researchers and practitioners.

More details will be available in a forthcoming ACM TOG paper entitled "Hierarchical RLE Level Set: A Versatile and Scalable Deformable Surface Representation."


The Compact RLE Level Set structure is used here to represent a deformable surface with a minimal bounding volume of 1.7 billion voxels.  [13 MB Quicktime]


Houston, B, Nielsen, M, Batty C, Nilsson, O & K Museth. (2005) "Gigantic Deformable Surfaces."  Proceedings of the SIGGRAPH 2005 Conference on Sketches & Applications. ACM Press. [PDF]

Gigantic Deformable Surfaces SIGGRAPH 2005 Presentation [PPT] 

 
@inproceedings{
   author = {Ben Houston and Michael Bang Nielsen and Christopher Batty and Ola Nilsson and Ken Museth},
   title = {Gigantic Deformable Surfaces},
   booktitle = {Proceedings of the SIGGRAPH 2005 Conference on
       Sketches \& Applications},
   year = {2005},
   location = {Los Angeles, California},
   publisher = {ACM Press},
   }
 

This research was supported in part by NRC IRAP Grant #482564.