An Efficient Method for Rendering Underwater Optical Effects Using Graphics Hardware

The display of realistic natural scenes is one of the most important research areas in computer graphics. Therendering of water is one of the essential components. This paper proposes an efficient method for renderingimages of scenes within water. For underwater scenery, the shafts of light and caustics are attractive and importantelements. However, computing these effects is difficult and time‐consuming since light refracts when passingthrough waves. To address the problem, our method makes use of graphics hardware to accelerate the computation.Our method displays the shafts of light by accumulating the intensities of streaks of light by using hardware colorblending functions. Making use of a Z‐buffer and a stencil buffer accelerates the rendering of caustics. Moreover,by using a shadow mapping technique, our method can display shafts of light and caustics taking account ofshadows due to objects. ACM CSS: I. 3.1 Computer Graphics—Hardware Architecture, I. 3.7 Computer Graphics—Three‐DimensionalGraphics and Realism     

Survey of Continuities of Curves and Surfaces

This survey presents an overview to various types of continuity of curves and surfaces, in particular parametric (Cⁿ), visual or geometric (Cⁿ, Gⁿ), Frenet frame (Fⁿ), and tangent surface continuity (Tⁿ), and discusses the relation with curve and surface modeling, visibility of (dis) continuities, and graphics rendering algorithms. It is the purpose of this paper to provide an overview of types of continuity, and to put many terms and definitions on a common footing in order to give an understanding of the subject. 1991 Computing Reviews Classification: I.3.5 [Computer Graphics] Computational geometry and object modeling. I.3.7 [Computer Graphics] Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism.