In this paper we introduce a new surface representation, the displaced subdivision surface. It represents a detailed surface model as a scalar-valued displacement over a smooth domain surface. Our representation defines both the domain surface and the displacement function using a unified subdivision framework, allowing for simple and efficient evaluation of analytic surface properties. We present a simple, automatic scheme for converting detailed geometric models into such a representation. The challenge in this conversion process is to find a simple subdivision surface that still faithfully expresses the detailed model as its offset. We demonstrate that displaced subdivision surfaces offer a number of benefits, including geometry compression, editing, animation, scalability, and adaptive rendering. In particular, the encoding of fine detail as a scalar function makes the representation extremely compact.

@inproceedings{Lee:2000:DSS,
   author = "Aaron Lee and Henry Moreton and Hugues Hoppe",
   title = "Displaced Subdivision Surfaces",
   booktitle = "Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2000",
   year = "2000",
   month = jul,
   pages = "85--94"
}