Reconstruction of B-spline skinning surface from generalized cylinder mesh

We propose a novel method to reconstruct B-spline surfaces from generalized cylindrical meshes by skinning. Skinning is a well known surface creation technique and has been used in CAD and CG modeling. However, there are few papers which address the issue of automated creation and preparation of sectional curves for skinning. Although our method is only applicable to generalized cylindrical meshes, there are many real world objects which can be created or reconstructed by skinning. The proposed surface reconstruction method is fully automated with minimal user interventions. We have evaluated the validity of this method by reconstructing B-spline surfaces from various polygonal meshes varying in shapes and geometries. The final results show the effectiveness of our proposed method.     

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.     

Real‐Time Fluid Effects on Surfaces using the Closest Point Method

The Closest Point Method (CPM) is a method for numerically solving partial differential equations (PDEs) on arbitrary surfaces, independent of the existence of a surface parametrization. The CPM uses a closest point representation of the surface, to solve the unmodified Cartesian version of a surface PDE in a 3D volume embedding, using simple and well‐understood techniques. In this paper, we present the numerical solution of the wave equation and the incompressible Navier‐Stokes equations on surfaces via the CPM, and we demonstrate surface appearance and shape variations in real‐time using this method. To fully exploit the potential of the CPM, we present a novel GPU realization of the entire CPM pipeline. We propose a surface‐embedding adaptive 3D spatial grid for efficient representation of the surface, and present a high‐performance approach using CUDA for converting surfaces given by triangulations into this representation. For real‐time performance, CUDA is also used for the numerical procedures of the CPM. For rendering the surface (and the PDE solution) directly from the closest point representation without the need to reconstruct a triangulated surface, we present a GPU ray‐casting method that works on the adaptive 3D grid.     

Efficient CPU‐based Volume Ray Tracing Techniques

Recent research on high‐performance ray tracing has achieved real‐time performance even for highly complex surface models already on a single PC. In this report, we provide an overview of techniques for extending real‐time ray tracing also to interactive volume rendering. We review fast rendering techniques for different volume representations and rendering modes in a variety of computing environments. The physically‐based rendering approach of ray tracing enables high image quality and allows for easily mixing surface, volume and other primitives in a scene, while fully accounting for all of their optical interactions. We present optimized implementations and discuss the use of upcoming high‐performance processors for volume ray tracing.     

Cross-sectional design with curvature constraints

A practical example of B-spline curve control points manipulation for the geometric construction of a free form shape is presented. Elements of a cross-sectional design methodology are used in conjunction with a skinning type operator for the definition of a B-spline surface. Skinning process is well established in the CAD community, but further difficulties arise in producing smooth surfaces under constraints. This paper attempts to overcome the fairness problem by choosing an appropriate solution where the execution time has to be reasonably short. Main results include an industrial application in a preliminary aerodynamic design cycle where manufacturing tolerances defined by smoothness criteria are maintained.     

Real-time Animation of Dressed Virtual Humans

In this paper, we describe a method for cloth animation in real‐time. The algorithm works in a hybrid manner exploiting the merits of both the physical‐based and geometric deformations. It makes use of predetermined conditions between the cloth and the body model, avoiding complex collision detection and physical deformations wherever possible. Garments are segmented into pieces that are simulated by various algorithms, depending on how they are laid on the body surface and whether they stick or flow on it. Tests show that the method is well suited to fully dressed virtual human models, achieving real‐time performance compared to ordinary cloth‐simulations.     

GeoBrush: Interactive Mesh Geometry Cloning

We propose a method for interactive cloning of 3D surface geometry using a paintbrush interface, similar to the continuous cloning brush popular in image editing. Existing interactive mesh composition tools focus on atomic copy‐and‐paste of preselected feature areas, and are either limited to copying surface displacements, or require the solution of variational optimization problems, which is too expensive for an interactive brush interface. In contrast, our GeoBrush method supports real‐time continuous copying of arbitrary high‐resolution surface features between irregular meshes, including topological handles. We achieve this by first establishing a correspondence between the source and target geometries using a novel generalized discrete exponential map parameterization. Next we roughly align the source geometry with the target shape using Green Coordinates with automatically‐constructed cages. Finally, we compute an offset membrane to smoothly blend the pasted patch with C continuity before stitching it into the target. The offset membrane is a solution of a bi‐harmonic PDE, which is computed on the GPU in real time by exploiting the regular parametric domain. We demonstrate the effectiveness of GeoBrush with various editing scenarios, including detail enrichment and completion of scanned surfaces.     

Real‐time Indirect Illumination of Emissive Inhomogeneous Volumes using Layered Polygonal Area Lights

Indirect illumination involving with visually rich participating media such as turbulent smoke and loud explosions contributes significantly to the appearances of other objects in a rendering scene. However, previous real‐time techniques have focused only on the appearances of the media directly visible from the viewer. Specifically, appearances that can be indirectly seen over reflective surfaces have not attracted much attention. In this paper, we present a real‐time rendering technique for such indirect views that involves the participating media. To achieve real‐time performance for computing indirect views, we leverage layered polygonal area lights (LPALs) that can be obtained by slicing the media into multiple flat layers. Using this representation, radiance entering each surface point from each slice of the volume is analytically evaluated to achieve instant calculation. The analytic solution can be derived for standard bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs) based on the microfacet theory. Accordingly, our method is sufficiently robust to work on surfaces with arbitrary shapes and roughness values. In addition, we propose a quadrature method for more accurate rendering of scenes with dense volumes, and a transformation of the domain of volumes to simplify the calculation and implementation of the proposed method. By taking advantage of these computation techniques, the proposed method achieves real‐time rendering of indirect illumination for emissive volumes.     

On‐The‐Fly Tracking of Flame Surfaces for the Visual Analysis of Combustion Processes

The visual analysis of combustion processes is one of the challenges of modern flow visualization. In turbulent combustion research, the behaviour of the flame surface contains important information about the interactions between turbulence and chemistry. The extraction and tracking of this surface is crucial for understanding combustion processes. This is impossible to realize as a post‐process because of the size of the involved datasets, which are too large to be stored on disk. We present an on‐the‐fly method for tracking the flame surface directly during simulation and computing the local tangential surface deformation for arbitrary time intervals. In a massively parallel simulation, the data are distributed over many processes and only a single time step is in memory at any time. To satisfy the demands on parallelism and accuracy posed by this situation, we track the surface with independent micro‐patches and adapt their distribution as needed to maintain numerical stability. With our method, we enable combustion researchers to observe the detailed movement and deformation of the flame surface over extended periods of time and thus gain novel insights into the mechanisms of turbulence–chemistry interactions. We validate our method on analytic ground truth data and show its applicability on two real‐world simulations.     

Reconstructing Animated Meshes from Time‐Varying Point Clouds

In this paper, we describe a novel approach for the reconstruction of animated meshes from a series of time‐deforming point clouds. Given a set of unordered point clouds that have been captured by a fast 3‐D scanner, our algorithm is able to compute coherent meshes which approximate the input data at arbitrary time instances. Our method is based on the computation of an implicit function in ?⁴ that approximates the time‐space surface of the time‐varying point cloud. We then use the four‐dimensional implicit function to reconstruct a polygonal model for the first time‐step. By sliding this template mesh along the time‐space surface in an as‐rigid‐as‐possible manner, we obtain reconstructions for further time‐steps which have the same connectivity as the previously extracted mesh while recovering rigid motion exactly. The resulting animated meshes allow accurate motion tracking of arbitrary points and are well suited for animation compression. We demonstrate the qualities of the proposed method by applying it to several data sets acquired by real‐time 3‐D scanners.     

Modeling And Solving An Engine Intake Manifold With Turbo Charger For Predictive Control

In this paper, we build the intake manifold model of an engine with a turbo charger and develop a high speed calculation algorithm for model‐based predictive control in real time. The model is built according to the analysis of its thermodynamic and hydrodynamic characteristics and the sampled experiment data. The model equations are presented as a set of differential equations with condition selection (bifurcation) on the right hand side. The switching surface is divided into two parts, sliding and crossing. The sliding mode on the switching surface is analyzed in detail, and a calculation algorithm is proposed to remove illegal crossing caused by the numerical errors on this surface. Also, the control formula and the condition guiding the bifurcation between these two parts are demonstrated. Using this method, we can solve this model over the entire region of input throttle angles, the stability is greatly increased, and the calculation time is greatly reduced for real time control systems.     

Parametric animation of performance‐captured mesh sequences

In this paper, we introduce an approach to high‐level parameterisation of captured mesh sequences of actor performance for real‐time interactive animation control. High‐level parametric control is achieved by non‐linear blending between multiple mesh sequences exhibiting variation in a particular movement. For example, walking speed is parameterised by blending fast and slow walk sequences. A hybrid non‐linear mesh sequence blending approach is introduced to approximate the natural deformation of non‐linear interpolation techniques whilst maintaining the real‐time performance of linear mesh blending. Quantitative results show that the hybrid approach gives an accurate real‐time approximation of offline non‐linear deformation. An evaluation of the approach shows good performance not only for entire meshes but also with specific mesh areas. Results are presented for single and multi‐dimensional parametric control of walking (speed/direction), jumping (height/distance) and reaching (height) from captured mesh sequences. This approach allows continuous real‐time control of high‐level parameters such as speed and direction whilst maintaining the natural surface dynamics of captured movement. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Local T-spline surface skinning

Skinning or lofting remains a challenging problem in computer graphics and free-form surface design. Although it was addressed by many researchers, no sufficiently general solution has been proposed yet. In the interpolating approach, the incompatibility of the input NURBS curves are solved by knot insertion. This process leads to an explosion in the number of control points defining the skinned surface. Other methods avoid this problem by generating skinned surfaces that approximate rather than interpolate the input curves. In this paper, we provide a solution to this problem using T-splines. Compared with existing approaches, a T-spline skinned surface interpolates a set of incompatible curves with a control mesh of fewer vertices. Typically, the linear system involved could be solved globally. However, our approach provides a local solution for each skinned curve. As such, local modification could be used to meet additional constraints such as given normal and/or predefined curvature across the skinned curves.     

Real-Time Translucent Rendering Using GPU-based Texture Space Importance Sampling

We present a novel approach for real‐time rendering of translucent surfaces. The computation of subsurface scattering is performed by first converting the integration over the 3D model surface into an integration over a 2D texture space and then applying importance sampling based on the irradiance stored in the texture. Such a conversion leads to a feasible GPU implementation and makes real‐time frame rate possible. Our implementation shows that plausible images can be rendered in real time for complex translucent models with dynamic light and material properties. For objects with more apparent local effect, our approach generally requires more samples that may downgrade the frame rate. To deal with this case, we decompose the integration into two parts, one for local effect and the other for global effect, which are evaluated by the combination of available methods [DS03, MKB* 03a] and our texture space importance sampling, respectively. Such a hybrid scheme is able to steadily render the translucent effect in real time with a fixed amount of samples.     

Surface Relief Analysis for Illustrative Shading

In this paper, we present an analysis technique that leverages the complexity found in detailed 3D models for illustrative shading purposes. Given a smooth base surface with relief, it locates relief features (concavities, convexities and inflections) around each surface point and at multiple scales, using cubic‐polynomial fitting. This object‐space, per‐vertex information is then used to guide a variety of shading techniques including normal enhancement, feature visualization, accessibility shading and radiance scaling. Thanks to this approach, features at multiple scales are easily combined, filtered and shaded, allowing users to explore surface relief in real‐time.     

Real‐Time Rendering of Wave‐Optical Effects on Scratched Surfaces

The visual appearance of real‐world materials is characterized by surface features across many scales and has received significant attention by the graphics community for decades. Yet, even the most advanced microfacet models have difficulties faithfully recreating materials like snow, sand, brushed metal or hair that feature scale‐violating glints and speckles and defy any traditional notion of filtering and level of detail. In this work, we address an important subset of such materials, namely metal and dielectric surfaces that are covered with microscopic scratches, e.g., from polishing processes or surface wear. The appearance of such surfaces features fine‐scale spatial detail and iridescent colors caused by diffraction, and has only recently been successfully recreated. We adopt the scratch iridescence model, which is known for plausible results in offline Monte Carlo settings but unsuitable for real‐time applications where extensive illumination sampling is prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we introduce an efficient technique for incoherently integrating the contributions of individual scratches, as well as closed‐form solutions for modeling spherical and polygonal area light sources, and for the first time bring scratch iridescence within reach of real‐time applications.     

Continuous Levels‐of‐Detail and Visual Abstraction for Seamless Molecular Visualization

Molecular visualization is often challenged with rendering of large molecular structures in real time. We introduce a novel approach that enables us to show even large protein complexes. Our method is based on the level‐of‐detail concept, where we exploit three different abstractions combined in one visualization. Firstly, molecular surface abstraction exploits three different surfaces, solvent‐excluded surface (SES), Gaussian kernels and van der Waals spheres, combined as one surface by linear interpolation. Secondly, we introduce three shading abstraction levels and a method for creating seamless transitions between these representations. The SES representation with full shading and added contours stands in focus while on the other side a sphere representation of a cluster of atoms with constant shading and without contours provide the context. Thirdly, we propose a hierarchical abstraction based on a set of clusters formed on molecular atoms. All three abstraction models are driven by one importance function classifying the scene into the near‐, mid‐ and far‐field. Moreover, we introduce a methodology to render the entire molecule directly using the A‐buffer technique, which further improves the performance. The rendering performance is evaluated on series of molecules of varying atom counts.     

Giant soap bubble creation model

We present a simple and real‐time technique for animating giant realistic looking soap bubbles. Unlike small spherical soap bubbles, giant soap bubbles stretch significantly and undergo globally varying and locally consistent deformations because of time‐varying surface tensions. For physically plausible surface tensions, we introduce and combine a variable‐length mass spring system and Gibbs elasticity and Marangoni elasticity. Using a proposed framework, we deform our models because of general forces from surface tensions, winds, and excessive pressures. Our framework effectively generates a physically plausible animation of giant soap bubbles, differing in shape according to the user's design; generates capillary waves and vibrations while floating in the air; and shows vivid iridescent colors corresponding to the deformations, all of which have been difficult to achieve using previous soap bubble animation methods. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Real‐time Rendering of Heterogeneous Translucent Objects with Arbitrary Shapes

We present a real‐time algorithm for rendering translucent objects of arbitrary shapes. We approximate the scattering of light inside the objects using the diffusion equation, which we solve on‐the‐fly using the GPU. Our algorithm is general enough to handle arbitrary geometry, heterogeneous materials, deformable objects and modifications of lighting, all in real‐time. In a pre‐processing step, we discretize the object into a regular 4‐connected structure (QuadGraph). Due to its regular connectivity, this structure is easily packed into a texture and stored on the GPU. At runtime, we use the QuadGraph stored on the GPU to solve the diffusion equation, in real‐time, taking into account the varying input conditions: Incoming light, object material and geometry. We handle deformable objects, provided the deformation does not change the topological structure of the objects.