TITLE:
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Survey of Techniques Used to Render Detailed Surfaces


ABSTRACT:
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Computer graphics applications, in special games and simulators, thrive to 
create high quality environments which we cannot differentiate from the real 
world. One of the features that determines the level of realism of a virtual 
environment is the level of detail of the objects in that environment.

In real-time computer graphics applications, real world objects are usually 
represented by a triangular mesh description of its boundary. In this case, an 
object's mesh usually needs millions of triangles to accurately represent a
real world object. However, as the mesh complexity increases, the performance 
tends to decrease. To solve this problem many techniques were proposed to 
simulate details over flat surfaces without increasing the surface's mesh 
geometry. 

In this work, we present a survey of the main techniques used to simulate 
details over flat surfaces, were for each technique we analyze and compare its 
features, such as: visual cues, quality and performance. We also try to define
the best environment to use each of the techniques evaluated.