Fast and Reliable Mouse Picking Using Graphics Hardware

摘要

Mouse picking is the most commonly used intuitive operation to interact with 3D scenes in a variety of 3D graphicsapplications. High performance for such operation is necessary in order to provide users with fast responses. Thispaper proposes a fast and reliable mouse picking algorithm using graphics hardware for 3D triangular scenes. Our approachuses a multi-layer rendering algorithm to perform the picking operation in linear time complexity. The objectspacebased ray-triangle intersection test is implemented in a highly parallelized geometry shader. After applying thehardware-supported occlusion queries, only a small number of objects (or sub-objects) are rendered in subsequent layers,which accelerates the picking efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate the high performance of our novel approach.Due to its simplicity, our algorithm can be easily integrated into existing real-time rendering systems.