Temporally Smooth Mesh Extraction for Procedural Scenes with Long-Range Camera Trajectories using Spacetime Octrees

Abstract

The procedural occupancy function is a flexible and compact representation for creating 3D scenes. For rasterization and other tasks, it is often necessary to extract a mesh that represents the shape. Unbounded scenes with long-range camera trajectories, such as flying through a forest, pose a unique challenge for mesh extraction. A single static mesh representing all the geometric detail necessary for the full camera path can be prohibitively large. Therefore, independent meshes can be extracted for different camera views, but this approach may lead to popping artifacts during transitions. We propose a temporally coherent method for extracting meshes suitable for long-range camera trajectories in unbounded scenes represented by an occupancy function. The key idea is to perform 4D mesh extraction using a new spacetime tree structure called a binary-octree. Experiments show that, compared to existing baseline methods, our method offers superior visual consistency at a comparable cost. The code and the supplementary video for this paper are available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/BinocMesher.