Gradients Are the New Intervals

Gradients are the new intervals At the New England Symposium on Graphics, James Tompkin compared graphics researchers to magpies: they're easily distracted by shiny objects and pretty renderings. While this is true, the analogy also holds from a different angle: when I'm reading graphics papers, I'm constantly looking for ideas to steal bring back to my nest. Researchers at IRIT and Adobe Research recently published a paper that's full of interesting ideas, and I'd like to talk about it. This blog post assumes a vague understanding of implicit surface rasterization, and how interval arithmetic is used to both skip regions of space and simplify complex expressions. See this section of the Fidget writeup for a short introduction, or my colloquium talk for a longer explanation. Here's the key sentence from the paper's abstract: We introduce an efficient hierarchical tree pruning method based on the Lipschitz property of SDFs, which is compatible with hard and smooth CSG operators. ... Read full article.