Exploratory Visualization of Animal Kinematics Using Instantaneous Helical Axes

We present novel visual and interactive techniques for exploratory visualization of animal kinematics using instantaneous helical axes (IHAs). The helical axis has been used in orthopedics, biomechanics, and structural mechanics as a construct for describing rigid body motion. Within biomechanics, recent imaging advances have made possible accurate high‐speed measurements of individual bone positions and orientations during experiments. From this high‐speed data, instantaneous helical axes of motion may be calculated. We address questions of effective interactive, exploratory visualization of this high‐speed 3D motion data. A 3D glyph that encodes all parameters of the IHA in visual form is presented. Interactive controls are used to examine the change in the IHA over time and relate the IHA to anatomical features of interest selected by a user. The techniques developed are applied to a stereoscopic, interactive visualization of the mechanics of pig mastication and assessed by a team of evolutionary biologists who found interactive IHA‐based analysis a useful addition to more traditional motion analysis techniques.     

Analytic Tangent Irradiance Environment Maps for Anisotropic Surfaces

Environment‐mapped rendering of Lambertian isotropic surfaces is common, and a popular technique is to use a quadratic spherical harmonic expansion. This compact irradiance map representation is widely adopted in interactive applications like video games. However, many materials are anisotropic, and shading is determined by the local tangent direction, rather than the surface normal. Even for visualization and illustration, it is increasingly common to define a tangent vector field, and use anisotropic shading. In this paper, we extend spherical harmonic irradiance maps to anisotropic surfaces, replacing Lambertian reflectance with the diffuse term of the popular Kajiya‐Kay model. We show that there is a direct analogy, with the surface normal replaced by the tangent. Our main contribution is an analytic formula for the diffuse Kajiya‐Kay BRDF in terms of spherical harmonics; this derivation is more complicated than for the standard diffuse lobe. We show that the terms decay even more rapidly than for Lambertian reflectance, going as l^–3, where l is the spherical harmonic order, and with only 6 terms (l = 0 and l = 2) capturing 99.8% of the energy. Existing code for irradiance environment maps can be trivially adapted for real‐time rendering with tangent irradiance maps. We also demonstrate an application to offline rendering of the diffuse component of fibers, using our formula as a control variate for Monte Carlo sampling.     

Ray Classification for Accelerated BVH Traversal

For ray tracing based methods, traversing a hierarchical acceleration data structure takes up a substantial portion of the total rendering time. We propose an additional data structure which cuts off large parts of the hierarchical traversal. We use the idea of ray classification combined with the hierarchical scene representation provided by a bounding volume hierarchy. We precompute short arrays of indices to subtrees inside the hierarchy and use them to initiate the traversal for a given ray class. This arrangement is compact enough to be cache‐friendly, preventing the method from negating its traversal gains by excessive memory traffic. The method is easy to use with existing renderers which we demonstrate by integrating it to the PBRT renderer. The proposed technique reduces the number of traversal steps by 42% on average, saving around 15% of time of finding ray‐scene intersection on average.     

Topographic Map Visualization from Adaptively Compressed Textures

Raster‐based topographic maps are commonly used in geoinformation systems to overlay geographic entities on top of digital terrain models. Using compressed texture formats for encoding topographic maps allows reducing latency times while visualizing large geographic datasets. Topographic maps encompass high‐frequency content with large uniform regions, making current compressed texture formats inappropriate for encoding them. In this paper we present a method for locally‐adaptive compression of topographic maps. Key elements include a Hilbert scan to maximize spatial coherence, efficient encoding of homogeneous image regions through arbitrarily‐sized texel runs, a cumulative run‐length encoding supporting fast random‐access, and a compression algorithm supporting lossless and lossy compression. Our scheme can be easily implemented on current programmable graphics hardware allowing real‐time GPU decompression and rendering of bilinear‐filtered topographic maps.     

Non‐iterative Second‐order Approximation of Signed Distance Functions for Any Isosurface Representation

Signed distance functions (SDF) to explicit or implicit surface representations are intensively used in various computer graphics and visualization algorithms. Among others, they are applied to optimize collision detection, are used to reconstruct data fields or surfaces, and, in particular, are an obligatory ingredient for most level set methods. Level set methods are common in scientific visualization to extract surfaces from scalar or vector fields. Usual approaches for the construction of an SDF to a surface are either based on iterative solutions of a special partial differential equation or on marching algorithms involving a polygonization of the surface. We propose a novel method for a non‐iterative approximation of an SDF and its derivatives in a vicinity of a manifold. We use a second‐order algebraic fitting scheme to ensure high accuracy of the approximation. The manifold is defined (explicitly or implicitly) as an isosurface of a given volumetric scalar field. The field may be given at a set of irregular and unstructured samples. Stability and reliability of the SDF generation is achieved by a proper scaling of weights for the Moving Least Squares approximation, accurate choice of neighbors, and appropriate handling of degenerate cases. We obtain the solution in an explicit form, such that no iterative solving is necessary, which makes our approach fast.     

A Single Image Representation Model for Efficient Stereoscopic Image Creation

Computer graphics is one of the most efficient ways to create a stereoscopic image. The process of stereoscopic CG generation is, however, still very inefficient compared to that of monoscopic CG generation. Despite that stereo images are very similar to each other, they are rendered and manipulated independently. Additional requirements for disparity control specific to stereo images lead to even greater inefficiency. This paper proposes a method to reduce the inefficiency accompanied in the creation of a stereoscopic image. The system automatically generates an optimized single image representation of the entire visible area from both cameras. The single image can be easily manipulated with conventional techniques, as it is spatially smooth and maintains the original shapes of scene objects. In addition, a stereo image pair can be easily generated with an arbitrary disparity setting. These convenient and efficient features are achieved by the automatic generation of a stereo camera pair, robust occlusion detection with a pair of Z‐buffers, an optimization method for spatial smoothness, and stereo image pair generation with a non‐linear disparity adjustment. Experiments show that our technique dramatically improves the efficiency of stereoscopic image creation while preserving the quality of the results.     

Interactive,Multiresolution Image‐Space Rendering for Dynamic Area Lighting

Area lights add tremendous realism, but rendering them interactively proves challenging. Integrating visibility is costly, even with current shadowing techniques, and existing methods frequently ignore illumination variations at unoccluded points due to changing radiance over the light's surface. We extend recent image‐space work that reduces costs by gathering illumination in a multiresolution fashion, rendering varying frequencies at corresponding resolutions. To compute visibility, we eschew shadow maps and instead rely on a coarse screen‐space voxelization, which effectively provides a cheap layered depth image for binary visibility queries via ray marching. Our technique requires no precomputation and runs at interactive rates, allowing scenes with large area lights, including dynamic content such as video screens.     

Temporally Coherent Adaptive Sampling for Imperfect Shadow Maps

We propose a new adaptive algorithm for determining virtual point lights (VPL) in the scope of real‐time instant radiosity methods, which use a limited number of VPLs. The proposed method is based on Metropolis‐Hastings sampling and exhibits better temporal coherence of VPLs, which is particularly important for real‐time applications dealing with dynamic scenes. We evaluate the properties of the proposed method in the context of the algorithm based on imperfect shadow maps and compare it with the commonly used inverse transform method. The results indicate that the proposed technique can significantly reduce the temporal flickering artifacts even for scenes with complex materials and textures. Further, we propose a novel splatting scheme for imperfect shadow maps using hardware tessellation. This scheme significantly improves the rendering performance particularly for complex and deformable scenes. We thoroughly analyze the performance of the proposed techniques on test scenes with detailed materials, moving camera, and deforming geometry.     

Fast and Efficient Skinning of Animated Meshes

Skinning is a simple yet popular deformation technique combining compact storage with efficient hardware accelerated rendering. While skinned meshes (such as virtual characters) are traditionally created by artists, previous work proposes algorithms to construct skinning automatically from a given vertex animation. However, these methods typically perform well only for a certain class of input sequences and often require long pre‐processing times. We present an algorithm based on iterative coordinate descent optimization which handles arbitrary animations and produces more accurate approximations than previous techniques, while using only standard linear skinning without any modifications or extensions. To overcome the computational complexity associated with the iterative optimization, we work in a suitable linear subspace (obtained by quick approximate dimensionality reduction) and take advantage of the typically very sparse vertex weights. As a result, our method requires about one or two orders of magnitude less pre‐processing time than previous methods.     

An Energy‐Conserving Hair Reflectance Model

We present a reflectance model for dielectric cylinders with rough surfaces such as human hair fibers. Our model is energy conserving and can evaluate arbitrarily many orders of internal reflection. Accounting for compression and contraction of specular cones produces a new longitudinal scattering function which is non‐Gaussian and includes an off‐specular peak. Accounting for roughness in the azimuthal direction leads to an integral across the hair fiber which is efficiently evaluated using a Gaussian quadrature. Solving cubic equations is avoided, caustics are included in the model in a consistent fashion, and more accurate colors are predicted by considering many internal pathways.     

Animated 3D Line Drawings with Temporal Coherence

Producing traditional animation is a laborious task where the key drawings are first drawn by artists and thereafter inbetween drawings are created, whether it is by hand or computer‐assisted. Auto‐inbetweening of these 2D key drawings by computer is a non‐trivial task as 3D depths are missing. An alternate approach is to generate all the drawings by extracting lines directly from animated 3D models frame by frame, concatenating and rendering them together into an animation. However, animation quality generated using this straightforward method bears two problems. Firstly, the animation contains unsatisfactory visual artifacts such as line flickering and popping. This is especially pronounced when the lines are extracted using high‐order derivatives, such as ridges and valleys, from 3D models represented in triangle meshes. Secondly, there is a lack of temporal continuity as each drawing is generated without taking its neighboring drawings into consideration. In this paper, we propose an improved approach over the straightforward method by transferring extracted 3D line drawings of each frame into individual 3D lines and processing them along the time domain. Our objective is to minimize the visual artifacts and incorporate temporal relationship of individual lines throughout the entire animation sequence. This is achieved by creating correspondent trajectory of each line from each frame and applying global optimization on each trajectory. To realize this target, we present a fully automatic novel approach, which consists of (1) a line matching algorithm, (2) an optimizing algorithm, taking into account both the variations of numbers and lengths of 3D lines in each frame, and (3) a robust tracing method for transferring collections of line segments extracted from the 3D models into individual lines. We evaluate our approach on several animated model sequences to demonstrate its effectiveness in producing line drawing animations with temporal coherence.     

Importance Sampling Techniques for Path Tracing in Participating Media

We introduce a set of robust importance sampling techniques which allow efficient calculation of direct and indirect lighting from arbitrary light sources in both homogeneous and heterogeneous media. We show how to distribute samples along a ray proportionally to the incoming radiance for point and area lights. In heterogeneous media, we decouple ray marching from light calculations by computing a representation of the transmittance function that can be quickly evaluated during sampling, at the cost of a small amount of bias. This representation also allows the calculation of another probability density function which can direct samples to regions most likely to scatter light. These techniques are orthogonal and can be combined via multiple importance sampling to further reduce variance. Our method has very modest per‐ray memory requirements and does not require any preprocessing, making it simple to integrate into production ray tracing based renderers.     

Sorted Deferred Shading for Production Path Tracing

Ray‐traced global illumination (GI) is becoming widespread in production rendering but incoherent secondary ray traversal limits practical rendering to scenes that fit in memory. Incoherent shading also leads to intractable performance with production‐scale textures forcing renderers to resort to caching of irradiance, radiosity, and other values to amortize expensive shading. Unfortunately, such caching strategies complicate artist workflow, are difficult to parallelize effectively, and contend for precious memory. Worse, these caches involve approximations that compromise quality. In this paper, we introduce a novel path‐tracing framework that avoids these tradeoffs. We sort large, potentially out‐of‐core ray batches to ensure coherence of ray traversal. We then defer shading of ray hits until we have sorted them, achieving perfectly coherent shading and avoiding the need for shading caches.     

Creating and Preserving Vortical Details in SPH Fluid

We present a new method to create and preserve the turbulent details generated around moving objects in SPH fluid. In our approach, a high‐resolution overlapping grid is bounded to each object and translates with the object. The turbulence formation is modeled by resolving the local flow around objects using a hybrid SPH‐FLIP method. Then these vortical details are carried on SPH particles flowing through the local region and preserved in the global field in a synthetic way. Our method provides a physically plausible way to model the turbulent details around both rigid and deformable objects in SPH fluid, and can efficiently produce animations of complex gaseous phenomena with rich visual details.     

Synthesizing Two‐character Interactions by Merging Captured Interaction Samples with their Spacetime Relationships

Existing synthesis methods for closely interacting virtual characters relied on user‐specified constraints such as the reaching positions and the distance between body parts. In this paper, we present a novel method for synthesizing new interacting motion by composing two existing interacting motion samples without the need to specify the constraints manually. Our method automatically detects the type of interactions contained in the inputs and determines a suitable timing for the interaction composition by analyzing the spacetime relationships of the input characters. To preserve the features of the inputs in the synthesized interaction, the two inputs will be aligned and normalized according to the relative distance and orientation of the characters from the inputs. With a linear optimization method, the output is the optimal solution to preserve the close interaction of two characters and the local details of individual character behavior. The output animations demonstrated that our method is able to create interactions of new styles that combine the characteristics of the original inputs.