Point-based modeling from a single image

The complexity of virtual environments has grown spectacularly over the recent years, mainly thanks to the use of the currently cheap high performance graphics cards. As the graphics cards improve the performance and the geometry complexity grows, many of the objects present in the scene only project to a few pixels on the screen. This represents a waste in computing effort for the transforming and clipping of maybe a lot of polygons that could be substituted by a simple point or a small set of points. Recently, efficient rendering algorithms for point models have been proposed. However, little attention has been focused on building a point-based modeler, using the advantages that such a representation can provide. In this paper we present a modeler that can generate 3D geometry from an image, completely built on points. It takes as input an image and creates a point-based representation from it. Then, a set of operators allow to modify the geometry in order to produce 3D geometry from the image. With our system it is possible to generate in short time complex geometries that would be difficult to model with a polygon-based modeler.