A Sparse Parametric Mixture Model for BTF Compression,Editing and Rendering

Bidirectional texture functions (BTFs) represent the appearance of complex materials. Three major shortcomings with BTFs are the bulky storage, the difficulty in editing and the lack of efficient rendering methods. To reduce storage, many compression techniques have been applied to BTFs, but the results are difficult to edit. To facilitate editing, analytical models have been fit, but at the cost of accuracy of representation for many materials. It becomes even more challenging if efficient rendering is also needed. We introduce a high‐quality general representation that is, at once, compact, easily editable, and can be efficiently rendered. The representation is computed by adopting the stagewise Lasso algorithm to search for a sparse set of analytical functions, whose weighted sum approximates the input appearance data. We achieve compression rates comparable to a state‐of‐the‐art BTF compression method. We also demonstrate results in BTF editing and rendering.     

Synthesis and rendering of bidirectional texture functions on arbitrary surfaces

The bidirectional texture function (BTF) is a 6D function that describes the appearance of a real-world surface as a function of lighting and viewing directions. The BTF can model the fine-scale shadows, occlusions, and specularities caused by surface mesostructures. In this paper, we present algorithms for efficient synthesis of BTFs on arbitrary surfaces and for hardware-accelerated rendering. For both synthesis and rendering, a main challenge is handling the large amount of data in a BTF sample. To addresses this challenge, we approximate the BTF sample by a small number of 4D point appearance functions (PAFs) multiplied by 2D geometry maps. The geometry maps and PAFs lead to efficient synthesis and fast rendering of BTFs on arbitrary surfaces. For synthesis, a surface BTF can be generated by applying a texton-based sysnthesis algorithm to a small set of 2D geometry maps while leaving the companion 4D PAFs untouched. As for rendering, a surface BTF synthesized using geometry maps is well-suited for leveraging the programmable vertex and pixel shaders on the graphics hardware. We present a real-time BTF rendering algorithm that runs at the speed of about 30 frames/second on a mid-level PC with an ATI Radeon 8500 graphics card. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our synthesis and rendering algorithms using both real and synthetic BTF samples.     

Level‐of‐Detail Streaming and Rendering using Bidirectional Sparse Virtual Texture Functions

Bidirectional Texture Functions (BTFs) are among the highest quality material representations available today and thus well suited whenever an exact reproduction of the appearance of a material or complete object is required. In recent years, BTFs have started to find application in various industrial settings and there is also a growing interest in the cultural heritage domain. BTFs are usually measured from real‐world samples and easily consist of tens or hundreds of gigabytes. By using data‐driven compression schemes, such as matrix or tensor factorization, a more compact but still faithful representation can be derived. This way, BTFs can be employed for real‐time rendering of photo‐realistic materials on the GPU. However, scenes containing multiple BTFs or even single objects with high‐resolution BTFs easily exceed available GPU memory on today's consumer graphics cards unless quality is drastically reduced by the compression. In this paper, we propose the Bidirectional Sparse Virtual Texture Function, a hierarchical level‐of‐detail approach for the real‐time rendering of large BTFs that requires only a small amount of GPU memory. More importantly, for larger numbers or higher resolutions, the GPU and CPU memory demand grows only marginally and the GPU workload remains constant. For this, we extend the concept of sparse virtual textures by choosing an appropriate prioritization, finding a trade off between factorization components and spatial resolution. Besides GPU memory, the high demand on bandwidth poses a serious limitation for the deployment of conventional BTFs. We show that our proposed representation can be combined with an additional transmission compression and then be employed for streaming the BTF data to the GPU from from local storage media or over the Internet. In combination with the introduced prioritization this allows for the fast visualization of relevant content in the users field of view and a consecutive progressive refinement.     

Edit Propagation on Bidirectional Texture Functions

We propose an efficient method for editing bidirectional texture functions (BTFs) based on edit propagation scheme. In our approach, users specify sparse edits on a certain slice of BTF. An edit propagation scheme is then applied to propagate edits to the whole BTF data. The consistency of the BTF data is maintained by propagating similar edits to points with similar underlying geometry/reflectance. For this purpose, we propose to use view independent features including normals and reflectance features reconstructed from each view to guide the propagation process. We also propose an adaptive sampling scheme for speeding up the propagation process. Since our method needn't any accurate geometry and reflectance information, it allows users to edit complex BTFs with interactive feedback.     

Bidirectional Rendering of Vector Light Transport

On the foundations of many rendering algorithms it is the symmetry between the path traversed by light and its adjoint path starting from the camera. However, several effects, including polarization or fluorescence, break that symmetry, and are defined only on the direction of light propagation. This reduces the applicability of bidirectional methods that exploit this symmetry for simulating effectively light transport. In this work, we focus on how to include these non‐symmetric effects within a bidirectional rendering algorithm. We generalize the path integral to support the constraints imposed by non‐symmetric light transport. Based on this theoretical framework, we propose modifications on two bidirectional methods, namely bidirectional path tracing and photon mapping, extending them to support polarization and fluorescence, in both steady and transient state.     

Interactive Diffraction from Biological Nanostructures

We describe a technique for interactive rendering of diffraction effects produced by biological nanostructures, such as snake skin surface gratings. Our approach uses imagery from atomic force microscopy that accurately captures the geometry of the nanostructures responsible for structural colouration, that is, colouration due to wave interference, in a variety of animals. We develop a rendering technique that constructs bidirectional reflection distribution functions (BRDFs) directly from the measured data and leverages pre‐computation to achieve interactive performance. We demonstrate results of our approach using various shapes of the surface grating nanostructures. Finally, we evaluate the accuracy of our pre‐computation‐based technique and compare to a reference BRDF construction technique     

Capturing and rendering geometry details for BTF-mapped surfaces

Bidirectional texture functions, or BTFs, accurately model reflectance variation at a fine (meso-) scale as a function of lighting and viewing direction. BTFs also capture view-dependent visibility variation, also called masking or parallax, but only within surface contours. Mesostructure detail is neglected at silhouettes, so BTF-mapped objects retain the coarse shape of the underlying model. We augment BTF rendering to obtain approximate mesoscale silhouettes. Our new representation, the 4D mesostructure distance function (MDF), tabulates the displacement from a reference frame where a ray first intersects the mesoscale geometry beneath as a function of ray direction and ray position along that reference plane. Given an MDF, the mesostructure silhouette can be rendered with a per-pixel depth peeling process on graphics hardware, while shading and local parallax are handled by the BTF. Our approach allows real-time rendering, handles complex, non-height-field mesostructure, requires that no additional geometry be sent to the rasterizer other than the mesh triangles, is more compact than textured visibility representations used previously, and, for the first time, can be easily measured from physical samples. We also adapt the algorithm to capture detailed shadows cast both by and onto BTF-mapped surfaces. We demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithm on a variety of BTF data, including real data acquired using our BTF–MDF measurement system.     

Specular Lobe‐Aware Filtering and Upsampling for Interactive Indirect Illumination

Although geometry‐aware filtering and upsampling have often been used for interactive or real‐time rendering, they are unsuitable for glossy surfaces because shading results strongly depend on the bidirectional reflectance distribution functions. This paper proposes a novel weighting function of cross bilateral filtering and upsampling to measure the similarity of specular lobes. The difficulty is that a specular lobe is represented with a distribution function in directional space, whereas conventional cross bilateral filtering evaluates similarities using the distance between two points in a Euclidean space. Therefore, this paper first generalizes cross bilateral filtering for the similarity of distribution functions in a non‐Euclidean space. Then, the weighting function is specialized for specular lobes. Our key insight is that the weighting function of bilateral filtering can be represented with the product integral of two distribution functions corresponding to two pixels. In addition, we propose spherical Gaussian‐based approximations to calculate this weighting function analytically. Our weighting function detects the edges of glossiness, and adapts to all‐frequency materials using only a camera position and G‐buffer. These features are not only suitable for path tracing, but also deferred shading and non‐ray tracing–based methods such as voxel cone tracing.     

g‐BRDFs: An Intuitive and Editable BTF Representation

Measured reflection data such as the bidirectional texture function (BTF) represent spatial variation under the full hemisphere of view and light directions and offer a very realistic visual appearance. Despite its high‐dimensional nature, recent compression techniques allow rendering of BTFs in real time. Nevertheless, a still unsolved problem is that there is no representation suited for real‐time rendering that can be used by designers to modify the BTF's appearance. For intuitive editing, a set of low‐dimensional comprehensible parameters, stored as scalars, colour values or texture maps, is required. In this paper we present a novel way to represent BTF data by introducing the geometric BRDF (g‐BRDF), which describes both the underlying meso‐ and micro‐scale structure in a very compact way. Both are stored in texture maps with only a few additional scalar parameters that can all be modified at runtime and thus give the designer full control over the material's appearance in the final real‐time application. The g‐BRDF does not only allow intuitive editing, but also reduces the measured data into a small set of textures, yielding a very effective compression method. In contrast to common material representation combining heightfields and BRDFs, our g‐BRDF is physically based and derived from direct measurement, thus representing real‐world surface appearance. In addition, we propose an algorithm for fully automatic decomposition of a given measured BTF into the g‐BRDF representation.     

Neural BTF Compression and Interpolation

The Bidirectional Texture Function (BTF) is a data‐driven solution to render materials with complex appearance. A typical capture contains tens of thousands of images of a material sample under varying viewing and lighting conditions. While capable of faithfully recording complex light interactions in the material, the main drawback is the massive memory requirement, both for storing and rendering, making effective compression of BTF data a critical component in practical applications. Common compression schemes used in practice are based on matrix factorization techniques, which preserve the discrete format of the original dataset. While this approach generalizes well to different materials, rendering with the compressed dataset still relies on interpolating between the closest samples. Depending on the material and the angular resolution of the BTF, this can lead to blurring and ghosting artefacts. An alternative approach uses analytic model fitting to approximate the BTF data, using continuous functions that naturally interpolate well, but whose expressive range is often not wide enough to faithfully recreate materials with complex non‐local lighting effects (subsurface scattering, inter‐reflections, shadowing and masking…). In light of these observations, we propose a neural network‐based BTF representation inspired by autoencoders: our encoder compresses each texel to a small set of latent coefficients, while our decoder additionally takes in a light and view direction and outputs a single RGB vector at a time. This allows us to continuously query reflectance values in the light and view hemispheres, eliminating the need for linear interpolation between discrete samples. We train our architecture on fabric BTFs with a challenging appearance and compare to standard PCA as a baseline. We achieve competitive compression ratios and high‐quality interpolation/extrapolation without blurring or ghosting artifacts.     

An Optimizing Compiler for Automatic Shader Bounding

Programmable shading provides artistic control over materials and geometry, but the black box nature of shaders makes some rendering optimizations difficult to apply. In many cases, it is desirable to compute bounds of shaders in order to speed up rendering. A bounding shader can be automatically derived from the original shader by a compiler using interval analysis, but creating optimized interval arithmetic code is non‐trivial. A key insight in this paper is that shaders contain metadata that can be automatically extracted by the compiler using data flow analysis. We present a number of domain‐specific optimizations that make the generated code faster, while computing the same bounds as before. This enables a wider use and opens up possibilities for more efficient rendering. Our results show that on average 42–44% of the shader instructions can be eliminated for a common use case: single‐sided bounding shaders used in lightcuts and importance sampling.     

Improved Model‐ and View‐Dependent Pruning of Large Botanical Scenes

We present an optimized pruning algorithm that allows for considerable geometry reduction in large botanical scenes while maintaining high and coherent rendering quality. We improve upon previous techniques by applying model‐specific geometry reduction functions and optimized scaling functions. For this we introduce the use of Precision and Recall (PR) as a measure of quality to rendering and show how PR‐scores can be used to predict better scaling values. We conducted a user‐study letting subjects adjust the scaling value, which shows that the predicted scaling matches the preferred ones. Finally, we extend the originally purely stochastic geometry prioritization for pruning to account for view‐optimized geometry selection, which allows to take global scene information, such as occlusion, into consideration. We demonstrate our method for the rendering of scenes with thousands of complex tree models in real‐time.     

Low‐Cost Subpixel Rendering for Diverse Displays

Subpixel rendering increases the apparent display resolution by taking into account the subpixel structure of a given display. In essence, each subpixel is addressed individually, allowing the underlying signal to be sampled more densely. Unfortunately, naïve subpixel sampling introduces colour aliasing, as each subpixel only displays a specific colour (usually R, G and B subpixels are used). As previous work has shown, chromatic aliasing can be reduced significantly by taking the sensitivity of the human visual system into account. In this work, we find optimal filters for subpixel rendering for a diverse set of 1D and 2D subpixel layout patterns. We demonstrate that these optimal filters can be approximated well with analytical functions. We incorporate our filters into GPU‐based multi‐sample anti‐aliasing to yield subpixel rendering at a very low cost (1–2 ms filtering time at HD resolution). We also show that texture filtering can be adapted to perform efficient subpixel rendering. Finally, we analyse the findings of a user study we performed, which underpins the increased visual fidelity that can be achieved for diverse display layouts, by using our optimal filters.     

Foveated Real‐Time Ray Tracing for Head‐Mounted Displays

Head‐mounted displays with dense pixel arrays used for virtual reality applications require high frame rates and low latency rendering. This forms a challenging use case for any rendering approach. In addition to its ability of generating realistic images, ray tracing offers a number of distinct advantages, but has been held back mainly by its performance. In this paper, we present an approach that significantly improves image generation performance of ray tracing. This is done by combining foveated rendering based on eye tracking with reprojection rendering using previous frames in order to drastically reduce the number of new image samples per frame. To reproject samples a coarse geometry is reconstructed from a G‐Buffer. Possible errors introduced by this reprojection as well as parts that are critical to the perception are scheduled for resampling. Additionally, a coarse color buffer is used to provide an initial image, refined smoothly by more samples were needed. Evaluations and user tests show that our method achieves real‐time frame rates, while visual differences compared to fully rendered images are hardly perceivable. As a result, we can ray trace non‐trivial static scenes for the Oculus DK2 HMD at 1182 × 1464 per eye within the the VSync limits without perceived visual differences.     

Light scattering from filaments

Photorealistic visualization of a huge number of individual filaments like in the case of hair, fur, or knitwear is a challenging task: Explicit rendering approaches for simulating radiance transfer at a filament get totally impracticable with respect to rendering performance and it is also not obvious how to derive efficient scattering functions for different levels of (geometric) abstraction or how to deal with very complex scattering mechanisms. We present a novel uniform formalism for light scattering from filaments in terms of radiance, which we call the bidirectional fiber scattering distribution function (BFSDF). We show that previous specialized approaches, which have been developed in the context of hair rendering, can be seen as instances of the BFSDF. Similar to the role of the BSSRDF for surface scattering functions, the BFSDF can be seen as a general approach for light scattering from filaments, which is suitable for deriving approximations in a canonic and systematic way. For the frequent cases of distant light sources and observers, we deduce an efficient far field approximation (bidirectional curve scattering distribution function, BCSDF). We show that on the basis of the BFSDF, parameters for common rendering techniques can be estimated in a non-ad-hoc, but physically-based way     

QuadriFlow: A Scalable and Robust Method for Quadrangulation

QuadriFlow is a scalable algorithm for generating quadrilateral surface meshes based on the Instant Field‐Aligned Meshes of Jakob et al. (ACM Trans. Graph. 34(6):189, 2015). We modify the original algorithm such that it efficiently produces meshes with many fewer singularities. Singularities in quadrilateral meshes cause problems for many applications, including parametrization and rendering with Catmull‐Clark subdivision surfaces. Singularities can rarely be entirely eliminated, but it is possible to keep their number small. Local optimization algorithms usually produce meshes with many singularities, whereas the best algorithms tend to require non‐local optimization, and therefore are slow. We propose an efficient method to minimize singularities by combining the Instant Meshes objective with a system of linear and quadratic constraints. These constraints are enforced by solving a global minimum‐cost network flow problem and local boolean satisfiability problems. We have verified the robustness and efficiency of our method on a subset of ShapeNet comprising 17,791 3D objects in the wild. Our evaluation shows that the quality of the quadrangulations generated by our method is as good as, if not better than, those from other methods, achieving about four times fewer singularities than Instant Meshes. Other algorithms that produce similarly few singularities are much slower; we take less than ten seconds to process each model. Our source code is publicly available.     

HMLFC: Hierarchical Motion‐Compensated Light Field Compression for Interactive Rendering

We present a new motion‐compensated hierarchical compression scheme (HMLFC) for encoding light field images (LFI) that is suitable for interactive rendering. Our method combines two different approaches, motion compensation schemes and hierarchical compression methods, to exploit redundancies in LFI. The motion compensation schemes capture the redundancies in local regions of the LFI efficiently (local coherence) and the hierarchical schemes capture the redundancies present across the entire LFI (global coherence). Our hybrid approach combines the two schemes effectively capturing both local as well as global coherence to improve the overall compression rate. We compute a tree from LFI using a hierarchical scheme and use phase shifted motion compensation techniques at each level of the hierarchy. Our representation provides random access to the pixel values of the light field, which makes it suitable for interactive rendering applications using a small run‐time memory footprint. Our approach is GPU friendly and allows parallel decoding of LF pixel values. We highlight the performance on the two‐plane parameterized light fields and obtain a compression ratio of 30–800× with a PSNR of 40–45 dB. Overall, we observe a ～2–5× improvement in compression rates using HMLFC over prior light field compression schemes that provide random access capability. In practice, our algorithm can render new views of resolution 512 × 512 on an NVIDIA GTX‐980 at ～200 fps.     

ISHair: Importance Sampling for Hair Scattering

We present an importance sampling method for the bidirectional scattering distribution function (bsdf) of hair. Our method is based on the multi‐lobe hair scattering model presented by Sadeghi et al. [ [SPJT10] ]. We reduce noise by drawing samples from a distribution that approximates the bsdf well. Our algorithm is efficient and easy to implement, since the sampling process requires only the evaluation of a few analytic functions, with no significant memory overhead or need for precomputation. We tested our method in a research raytracer and a production renderer based on micropolygon rasterization. We show significant improvements for rendering direct illumination using multiple importance sampling and for rendering indirect illumination using path tracing.