Approximating 3D general sweep boundary using depth-buffer

Abstract

This paper presents a. practical technique for approximating the boundary surface of the volume swept out by three-dimensional objects using the depth-buffer. Objects may change their geometries and orientations while sweeping. The sweep volume is approximated as a union of volume elements, which are just rendered inside appropriate viewing frusta of virtual cameras and mapped into screen viewports with depth-buffer. From. the depth of each pixel in the screen spare of each rendering, the corresponding point in the original world space can be computed. Appropriately connecting these points yields polygonal faces forming polygonal surface patches approximately covering some portion of the sweep volume. Each view frustum adds one or more surface patches in this way, and these presumably overlapped polygonal surface patches approximately enclose the whole sweep volume. These patches may further be processed to yield non-overlapped polygonal surfaces as an approximation to the boundary of the original 3D sweep volume.