Mukherjee, Jayanta, Kumar, A., Das, P.P. and Chatterji, B.N. (1998):
Discrete Shading Algorithms for 3D objects from Medial Sphere Representation,
Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing:
Recent Advances, proc. ICVGIP, IIT Delhi, pp. 185-190. 

Abstract. 

In this paper we present a discrete shading technique using Medial Axis Transform (MAT) of 3D binary image data based on digital generalized octagonal distances. Our method is computationally attractive as it does not require the explicit computation of surface normals. We have compared our results with images rendered from voxel and octree representations while using analytical surface rendered images as bench marks. The quality of rendering by our method is certainly superior to those obtained from voxel and octree representations.  download full paper