28-Issue 4
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Item GPU-Assisted High Quality Particle Rendering(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Cha, Deukhyun; Son, Sungjin; Ihm, InsungVisualizing dynamic participating media in particle form by fully solving equations from the light transport theory is a computationally very expensive process. In this paper, we present a computational pipeline for particle volume rendering that is easily accelerated by the current GPU. To fully harness its massively parallel computing power, we transform input particles into a volumetric density field using a GPU-assisted, adaptive density estimation technique that iteratively adapts the smoothing length for local grid cells. Then, the volume data is visualized efficiently based on the volume photon mapping method where our GPU techniques further improve the rendering quality offered by previous implementations while performing rendering computation in acceptable time. It is demonstrated that high quality volume renderings can be easily produced from large particle datasets in time frames of a few seconds to less than a minute.Item Spatial Directional Radiance Caching(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Gassenbauer, Vaclav; Krivanek, Jaroslav; Bouatouch, KadiWe present a new approach for accelerated global illumination computation in scenes with glossy surfaces. Our algorithm combines sparse illumination computation used in the radiance caching algorithm with BRDF importance sampling. To make this approach feasible, we extend the idea of lazy illumination evaluation, used in the caching approaches, from the spatial to the directional domain. Using importance sampling allows us to apply caching not only on low-gloss but also on shiny materials with high-frequency BRDFs, for which the radiance caching algorithm breaks down.Item Motion based Painterly Rendering(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Lee, H.; Lee, C. H.; Yoon, K.Previous painterly rendering techniques normally use image gradients for deciding stroke orientations. Image gradients are good for expressing object shapes, but difficult to express the flow or movements of objects. In real painting, the use of brush strokes corresponding to the actual movement of objects allows viewers to recognize objects motion better and thus to have an impression of the dynamic. In this paper, we propose a novel painterly rendering algorithm to express dynamic objects based on their motion information. We first extract motion information (magnitude, direction, standard deviation) of a scene from a set of consecutive image sequences from the same view. Then the motion directions are used for determining stroke orientations in the regions with significant motions, and image gradients determine stroke orientations where little motion is observed. Our algorithm is useful for realistically and dynamically representing moving objects. We have applied our algorithm for rendering landscapes. We could segment a scene into dynamic and static regions, and express the actual movement of dynamic objects using motion based strokes.Item Packet-based Hierarchal Soft Shadow Mapping(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Yang, Baoguang; Feng, Jieqing; Guennebaud, Gael; Liu, XinguoRecent soft shadow mapping techniques based on back-projection can render high quality soft shadows in real time. However, real time high quality rendering of large penumbrae is still challenging, especially when multilayer shadow maps are used to reduce single light sample silhouette artifact. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm to attack this problem. We first present a GPU-friendly packet-based approach rendering a packet of neighboring pixels together to amortize the cost of computing visibility factors. Then, we propose a hierarchical technique to quickly locate the contour edges, further reducing the computation cost. At last, we suggest a multi-view shadow map approach to reduce the single light sample artifact. We also demonstrate its higher image quality and higher efficiency compared to the existing depth peeling approaches.Item Dart Throwing on Surfaces(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Cline, D.; Jeschke, S.; White, K.; Razdan, A.; Wonka, P.In this paper we present dart throwing algorithms to generate maximal Poisson disk point sets directly on 3D surfaces. We optimize dart throwing by efficiently excluding areas of the domain that are already covered by existing darts. In the case of triangle meshes, our algorithm shows dramatic speed improvement over comparable sampling methods. The simplicity of our basic algorithm naturally extends to the sampling of other surface types, including spheres, NURBS, subdivision surfaces, and implicits. We further extend the method to handle variable density points, and the placement of arbitrary ellipsoids without overlap. Finally, we demonstrate how to adapt our algorithm to work with geodesic instead of Euclidean distance. Applications for our method include fur modeling, the placement of mosaic tiles and polygon remeshing.Item Single Photo Estimation of Hair Appearance(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Bonneel, Nicolas; Paris, Sylvain; Van De Panne, Michiel; Durand, Fredo; Drettakis, GeorgeSignificant progress has been made in high-quality hair rendering, but it remains difficult to choose parameter values that reproduce a given real hair appearance. In particular, for applications such as games where naive users want to create their own avatars, tuning complex parameters is not practical. Our approach analyses a single flash photograph and estimates model parameters that reproduce the visual likeness of the observed hair. The estimated parameters include color absorptions, three reflectance lobe parameters of a multiple-scattering rendering model, and a geometric noise parameter. We use a novel melanin-based model to capture the natural subspace of hair absorption parameters. At its core, the method assumes that images of hair with similar color distributions are also similar in appearance. This allows us to recast the issue as an image retrieval problem where the photo is matched with a dataset of rendered images; we thus also match the model parameters used to generate these images. An earth-mover s distance is used between luminance-weighted color distributions to gauge similarity. We conduct a perceptual experiment to evaluate this metric in the context of hair appearance and demonstrate the method on 64 photographs, showing that it can achieve a visual likeness for a large variety of input photos.Item Interactive Global Photon Mapping(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Fabianowski, B.; Dingliana, J.We present a photon mapping technique capable of computing high quality global illumination at interactive frame rates. By extending the concept of photon differentials to efficiently handle diffuse reflections, we generate footprints at all photon hit points. These enable illumination reconstruction by density estimation with variable kernel bandwidths without having to locate the k nearest photon hits first. Adapting an efficient BVH construction process for ray tracing acceleration, we build photon maps that enable the fast retrieval of all hits relevant to a shading point. We present a heuristic that automatically tunes the BVH build s termination criterion to the scene and illumination conditions. As all stages of the algorithm are highly parallelizable, we demonstrate an implementation using NVidia s CUDA manycore architecture running at interactive rates on a single GPU. Both light source and camera may be freely moved with global illumination fully recalculated in each frame.Item Hierarchical Image-Space Radiosity for Interactive Global Illumination(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Nichols, Greg; Shopf, Jeremy; Wyman, ChrisWe introduce image-space radiosity and a hierarchical variant as a method for interactively approximating diffuse indirect illumination in fully dynamic scenes. As oft observed, diffuse indirect illumination contains mainly low-frequency details that do not require independent computations at every pixel. Prior work leverages this to reduce computation costs by clustering and caching samples in world or object space. This often involves scene preprocessing, complex data structures for caching, or wasted computations outside the view frustum. We instead propose clustering computations in image space, allowing the use of cheap hardware mipmapping and implicit quadtrees to allow coarser illumination computations. We build on a recently introduced multiresolution splatting technique combined with an image-space lightcut algorithm to intelligently choose virtual point lights for an interactive, one-bounce instant radiosity solution. Intelligently selecting point lights from our reflective shadow map enables temporally coherent illumination similar to results using more than 4096 regularly-sampled VPLs.Item Texture Design and Draping in 2D Images(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Winnemoeller, H.; Orzan, A.; Boissieux, L.; Thollot, J.We present a complete system for designing and manipulating regular or near-regular textures in 2D images. We place emphasis on supporting creative workflows that produce artwork from scratch. As such, our system provides tools to create, arrange, and manipulate textures in images with intuitive controls, and without requiring 3D modeling. Additionally, we ensure continued, non-destructive editability by expressing textures via a fully parametric descriptor. We demonstrate the suitability of our approach with numerous example images, created by an artist using our system, and we compare our proposed workflow with alternative 2D and 3D methods.Item The Use of Precomputed Triangle Clusters for Accelerated Ray Tracing in Dynamic Scenes(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Garanzha, KirillIn this paper we present a hybrid algorithm for building the bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) that is used in accelerating ray tracing of animated models. This algorithm precomputes densely packed clusters of triangles on surfaces. Folowing that, a set of clusters is used to rebuild the BVH in every frame. Our approach utilizes the assumption that groups of connected triangles remain connected throughout the course of the animation. We introduce a novel heuristic to create triangle clusters that are designed for high performance ray tracing. This heuristic combines the density of connectivity, geometric size and the shape of the cluster.Our approach accelerates the BVH builder by an order of magnitude rebuilding only the set of clusters that is much smaller than the original set of triangles. The speed-up is achieved against a brute-force BVH builder that repartitions all triangles in every frame of animation without using any pre-clustering. The rendering performance is not affected when a cluster contains a few dozen triangles. We demonstrate the real-time/interactive ray tracing performance for highly-dynamic complex models.Item Deterministic Importance Sampling with Error Diffusion(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Szirmay-Kalos, Laszlo; Szecsi, LaszloThis paper proposes a deterministic importance sampling algorithm that is based on the recognition that delta-sigma modulation is equivalent to importance sampling. We propose a generalization for delta-sigma modulation in arbitrary dimensions, taking care of the curse of dimensionality as well. Unlike previous sampling techniques that transform low-discrepancy and highly stratified samples in the unit cube to the integration domain, our error diffusion sampler ensures the proper distribution and stratification directly in the integration domain. We also present applications, including environment mapping and global illumination rendering with virtual point sources.Item Locally Adapted Projections to Reduce Panorama Distortions(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Kopf, Johannes; Lischinski, Dani; Deussen, Oliver; Cohen-Or, Daniel; Cohen, MichaelDisplaying panoramic and wide angle views on a flat 2D display surface is necessarily prone to distortions. Perspective projections are limited to fairly narrow view angles. Cylindrical and spherical projections can show full 360 panoramas, but at the cost of curving straight lines, interfering with the perception of salient shapes in the scene.In this paper, we introduce locally-adapted projections. Such projections are defined by a continuous projection surface consisting of both near-planar and curved parts. A simple and intuitive user interface allows the specification of regions of interest to be mapped to the near-planar parts, thereby reducing bending artifacts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a variety of panoramic and wide angle images, including both indoor and outdoor scenes.Item Estimating Specular Roughness and Anisotropy from Second Order Spherical Gradient Illumination(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Ghosh, Abhijeet; Chen, Tongbo; Peers, Pieter; Wilson, Cyrus A.; Debevec, PaulThis paper presents a novel method for estimating specular roughness and tangent vectors, per surface point, from polarized second order spherical gradient illumination patterns. We demonstrate that for isotropic BRDFs, only three second order spherical gradients are sufficient to robustly estimate spatially varying specular roughness. For anisotropic BRDFs, an additional two measurements yield specular roughness and tangent vectors per surface point. We verify our approach with different illumination configurations which project both discrete and continuous fields of gradient illumination. Our technique provides a direct estimate of the per-pixel specular roughness and thus does not require off-line numerical optimization that is typical for the measure-and-fit approach to classical BRDF modeling.Item Characteristic Point Maps(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Wu, Hongzhi; Dorsey, Julie; Rushmeier, HollyExtremely dense spatial sampling is often needed to prevent aliasing when rendering objects with high frequency variations in geometry and reflectance. To accelerate the rendering process, we introduce characteristic point maps (CPMs), a hierarchy of view-independent points, which are chosen to preserve the appearance of the original model across different scales. In preprocessing, randomized matrix column sampling is used to reduce an initial dense sampling to a minimum number of characteristic points with associated weights. In rendering, the reflected radiance is computed using a weighted average of reflectances from characteristic points. Unlike existing techniques, our approach requires no restrictions on the original geometry or reflectance functions.Item Frontmatter(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009)Item Fast Global Illumination on Dynamic Height Fields(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Nowrouzezahrai, Derek; Snyder, JohnWe present a real-time method for rendering global illumination effects from large area and environmental lights on dynamic height fields. In contrast to previous work, our method handles inter-reflections (indirect lighting) and non-diffuse surfaces. To reduce sampling, we construct one multi-resolution pyramid for height variation to compute direct shadows, and another pyramid for each indirect bounce of incident radiance to compute inter-reflections. The basic principle is to sample the points blocking direct light, or shedding indirect light, from coarser levels of the pyramid the farther away they are from a given receiver point. We unify the representation of visibility and indirect radiance at discrete azimuthal directions (i.e., as a function of a single elevation angle) using the concept of a casting set of visible points along this direction whose contributions are collected in the basis of normalized Legendre polynomials. This analytic representation is compact, requires no precomputation, and allows efficient integration to produce the spherical visibility and indirect radiance signals. Sub-sampling visibility and indirect radiance, while shading with full-resolution surface normals, further increases performance without introducing noticeable artifacts. Our method renders 512x512 height fields (> 500K triangles) at 36Hz.Item Soft Textured Shadow Volume(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Forest, Vincent; Barthe, Loic; Guennebaud, Gael; Paulin, MathiasEfficiently computing robust soft shadows is a challenging and time consuming task. On the one hand, the quality of image-based shadows is inherently limited by the discrete property of their framework. On the other hand, object-based algorithms do not exhibit such discretization issues but they can only efficiently deal with triangles having a constant transmittance factor. This paper addresses this limitation. We propose a general algorithm for the computation of robust and accurate soft shadows for triangles with a spatially varying transmittance. We then show how this technique can be efficiently included into object-based soft shadow algorithms. This results in unified object-based frameworks for computing robust direct shadows for both standard and perforated triangles in fully animated scenes.Item BTF Compression via Sparse Tensor Decomposition(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Ruiters, Roland; Klein, ReinhardIn this paper, we present a novel compression technique for Bidirectional Texture Functions based on a sparse tensor decomposition. We apply the K-SVD algorithm along two different modes of a tensor to decompose it into a small dictionary and two sparse tensors. This representation is very compact, allowing for considerably better compression ratios at the same RMS error than possible with current compression techniques like PCA, N-mode SVD and Per Cluster Factorization. In contrast to other tensor decomposition based techniques, the use of a sparse representation achieves a rendering performance that is at high compression ratios similar to PCA based methods.Item A Robust Illumination Estimate for Chromatic Adaptation in Rendered Images(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Wilkie, Alexander; Weidlich, AndreaWe propose a method that improves automatic colour correction operations for rendered images. In particular, we propose a robust technique for estimating the visible and pertinent illumination in a given scene. We do this at very low computational cost by mostly re-using information that is already being computed during the image synthesis process. Conventional illuminant estimations either operate only on 2D image data, or, if they do go beyond pure image analysis, only use information on the luminaires found in the scene. The latter is usually done with little or no regard for how the light sources actually affect the part of the scene that is being viewed. Our technique goes beyond that, and also takes object reflectance into account, as well as the incident light that is actually responsible for the colour of the objects that one sees. It is therefore able to cope with difficult cases, such as scenes with mixed illuminants, complex scenes with many light sources of varying colour, or strongly coloured indirect illumination.Item FastV: From-point Visibility Culling on Complex Models(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Chandak, Anish; Antani, Lakulish; Taylor, Micah; Manocha, DineshWe present an efficient technique to compute the potentially visible set (PVS) of triangles in a complex 3D scene from a viewpoint. The algorithm computes a conservative PVS at object space accuracy. Our approach traces a high number of small, volumetric frusta and computes blockers for each frustum using simple intersection tests. In practice, the algorithm can compute the PVS of CAD and scanned models composed of millions of triangles at interactive rates on a multi-core PC. We also use the visibility algorithm to accurately compute the reflection paths from a point sound source. The resulting sound propagation algorithm is 10-20X faster than prior accurate geometric acoustic methods.