I have written a library that implements most of the PostScript rendering model in 3D via extrusion (see screenshot). It works great and is pretty fast. But the bottleneck is tessellation, which isn’t surprising. However, I would have expected that tessellation is something to be pushed off onto the graphics card rather than being done on the CPU inside of GLU. Anyone have insights into this?
This is the kind of thing ‘geometry shaders’ are for. Unfortunately, use is restricted to only very recent hardware I think. Some people have developed techniques that are apparently able to produce equivalent functionality, possibly even faster, on more common hardware. A bit beyond me at this stage, I’m afraid. It all seems a bit bleeding edge, so I’m not sure if you’ll be able to integrate it well… anyway, here’s a link:
http://nvision.sourceforge.net/