As real time graphics aspires to movie-quality rendering, higher order, smooth surface representations take center stage. Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces are the dominant higher-order surface type used in feature films as they can model surfaces of arbitrary topological type and provide a compact representation for smooth surfaces that facilitate modeling and animation. Although Catmull-Clark surfaces are popular in Digital Content Creation packages (DCC) and feature films, their use has been hindered in real time applications because the exact evaluation of such surfaces on modern GPUs is neither memory nor performance efficient. Developments in hardware and recent theoretical results in efficient substitutes for subdivision surfaces bring us to the possibility to see real-time cinematic rendering in the near future.

We present a new method for approximating subdivision surfaces with hardware accelerated parametric patches. Our method improves the memory bandwidth requirements for patch control points, translating into superior performance compared to existing methods. Our input is general, allowing for meshes that contain both quadrilateral and triangular faces in the input control mesh, as well as control meshes with boundary. We present two implementations of our scheme designed to run on Direct3D 11 class hardware equipped with a tessellator unit.

We present a fast algorithm for converting quad meshes on the GPU to smooth surfaces. Meshes with 12,000 input quads, of which 60% have one or more non-4-valent vertices, are converted, evaluated and rendered with 9times9 resolution per quad at 50 frames per second. The conversion reproduces bi-cubic splines wherever possible and closely mimics the shape of the Catmull-Clark subdivision surface by c-patches where a vertex has a valence different from 4. The smooth surface is piecewise polynomial and has well-defined normals everywhere. The evaluation avoids pixel dropout.

Abstract Polyhedral meshes consisting of triangles, quads, and pentagons and polar configurations cover all major sampling and modeling scenarios. We give an algorithm for efficient local, parallel conversion of such meshes to an everywhere smooth surface consisting of low‐degree polynomial pieces. Quadrilateral facets with 4‐valent vertices are ‘regular’ and are mapped to bi‐cubic patches so that adjacent bi‐cubics join C2 as for cubic tensor‐product splines. The algorithm can be implemented in the vertex and geometry shaders of the GPU pipeline and does not use the fragment shader. Its implementation in DirectX 10 achieves conversion plus rendering at 659 frames per second with 42.5 million triangles per second on input of a model of 1300 facets of which 60% are not regular.

MOTIVATION: In the post-genomic era, biologists interested in systems biology often need to import data from public databases and construct their own system-specific or subject-oriented databases to support their complex analysis and knowledge discovery. To facilitate the analysis and data processing, customized and centralized databases are often created by extracting and integrating heterogeneous data retrieved from public databases. A generalized methodology for accessing, extracting, transforming and integrating the heterogeneous data is needed. RESULTS: This paper presents a new data integration approach named JXP4BIGI (Java XML Page for Biological Information Gathering and Integration). The approach provides a system-independent framework, which generalizes and streamlines the steps of accessing, extracting, transforming and integrating the data retrieved from heterogeneous data sources to build a customized data warehouse. It allows the data integrator of a biological database to define the desired bio-entities in XML templates (or Java XML pages), and use embedded extended SQL statements to extract structured, semi-structured and unstructured data from public databases. By running the templates in the JXP4BIGI framework and using a number of generalized wrappers, the required data from public databases can be efficiently extracted and integrated to construct the bio-entities in the XML format without having to hard-code the extraction logics for different data sources. The constructed XML bio-entities can then be imported into either a relational database system or a native XML database system to build a biological data warehouse. AVAILABILITY: JXP4BIGI has been integrated and tested in conjunction with the IKBAR system (http://www.ikbar.org/) in two integration efforts to collect and integrate data for about 200 human genes related to cell death from HUGO, Ensembl, and SWISS-PROT (Bairoch and Apweiler, 2000), and about 700 Drosophila genes from FlyBase (FlyBase Consortium, 2002). The integrated data has been used in comparative genomic analysis of x-ray induced cell death. Also, as explained later, JXP4BIGI is a middleware and framework to be integrated with biological database applications, and cannot run as a stand-alone software for end users. For demonstration purposes, a demonstration version is accessible at (http://www.ikbar.org/jxp4bigi/demo.html).