Interactive Subsurface Scattering for Materials With High Scattering Distances

Existing algorithms for rendering subsurface scattering in real time cannot deal well with scattering over longer distances. Kernels for image space algorithms become very large in these circumstances and separation does not work anymore, while geometry-based algorithms cannot preserve details very well. We present a novel approach that deals with all these downsides. While for lower scattering distances, the advantages of geometry-based methods are small, this is not the case anymore for high scattering distances (as we will show). Our proposed method takes advantage of the highly detailed results of image space algorithms and combines it with a geometry-based method to add the essential scattering from sources not included in image space. Our algorithm does not require pre-computation based on the scene's geometry, it can be applied to static and animated objects directly. Our method is able to provide results that come close to ray-traced images which we will show in direct comparisons with images generated by PBRT. We will compare our results to state of the art techniques that are applicable in these scenarios and will show that we provide superior image quality while maintaining interactive rendering times.      

Efficient rendering of animated characters through optimized per‐joint impostors

In this paper, we present a new impostor‐based representation for 3D animated characters supporting real‐time rendering of thousands of agents. We maximize rendering performance by using a collection of pre‐computed impostors sampled from a discrete set of view directions. Our approach differs from previous work on view‐dependent impostors in that we use per‐joint rather than per‐character impostors. Our characters are animated by applying the joint rotations directly to the impostors, instead of choosing a single impostor for the whole character from a set of pre‐defined poses. This offers more flexibility in terms of animation clips, as our representation supports any arbitrary pose, and thus, the agent behavior is not constrained to a small collection of pre‐defined clips. Because our impostors are intended to be valid for any pose, a key issue is to define a proper boundary for each impostor to minimize image artifacts while animating the agents. We pose this problem as a variational optimization problem and provide an efficient algorithm for computing a discrete solution as a pre‐process. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a crowd rendering algorithm encompassing image‐based performance, small graphics processing unit footprint, and animation independence is proposed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Physically Based Real-Time Rendering of Teeth and Partial Restorations

Visually accurate real-time rendering of teeth has many applications ranging from computer games to dental computer aided design (CAD). Similar to skin, the realistic and physically correct appearance of teeth cannot be achieved by simply using opaque diffuse textures, mainly because of the subsurface scattering behaviours of both. While both have a layered structure in common, the scattering characteristics of the teeth layers are drastically different from those of the skin, making rendering much more complicated. We present an approach which uses the Henyey–Greenstein scattering to achieve a near realistic real-time rendering of human teeth. To simulate the multi-layered geometry of teeth, we use standardized teeth models with dentin cores and fit them to real scanned teeth or dental restorations. By using a proxy geometry to compute the scattering, we can also render partial restorations as they would look like when attached to the remaining teeth. Finally, we compare our results to the VITA shade systems and human teeth to evaluate the visual fidelity of our approach.     

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.     

GPU‐Based Spherical Light Field Rendering with Per‐Fragment Depth Correction

Image‐based rendering techniques are a powerful alternative to traditional polygon‐based computer graphics. This paper presents a novel light field rendering technique which performs per‐pixel depth correction of rays for high‐quality reconstruction. Our technique stores combined RGB and depth values in a parabolic 2D texture for every light field sample acquired at discrete positions on a uniform spherical setup. Image synthesis is implemented on the GPU as a fragment program which extracts the correct image information from adjacent cameras for each fragment by applying per‐pixel depth correction of rays. We show that the presented image‐based rendering technique provides a significant improvement compared to previous approaches. We explain two different rendering implementations which make use of a uniform parametrisation to minimise disparity problems and ensure full six degrees of freedom for virtual view synthesis. While one rendering algorithm implements an iterative refinement approach for rendering light fields with per pixel depth correction, the other approach employs a raycaster, which provides superior rendering quality at moderate frame rates. GPU based per‐fragment depth correction of rays, used in both implementations, helps reducing ghosting artifacts to a non‐noticeable amount and provides a rendering technique that performs without exhaustive pre‐processing for 3D object reconstruction and without real‐time ray‐object intersection calculations at rendering time.     

Subsurface scattering using splat-based diffusion in point-based rendering

Point-based graphics has gained much attention as an alternative to polygon-based approaches because of its simplicity and flexibility. However, current point-based techniques do not provide a sufficient rendering quality for translucent materials such as human skin. In this paper, we propose a point-based framework with subsurface scattering of light, which is important to create the soft and semi-translucent appearance of human skin. To accurately simulate subsurface scattering in multilayered materials, ...     

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.     

Real-Time Glints Rendering With Pre-Filtered Discrete Stochastic Microfacets

Many real-life materials have a sparkling appearance. Examples include metallic paints, sparkling fabrics and snow. Simulating these sparkles is important for realistic rendering but expensive. As sparkles come from small shiny particles reflecting light into a specific direction, they are very challenging for illumination simulation. Existing approaches use a four-dimensional hierarchy, searching for light-reflecting particles simultaneously in space and direction. The approach is accurate, but extremely expensive. A separable model is much faster, but still not suitable for real-time applications. The performance problem is even worse when illumination comes from environment maps, as they require either a large sample count per pixel or pre-filtering. Pre-filtering is incompatible with the existing sparkle models, due to the discrete multi-scale representation. In this paper, we present a GPU-friendly, pre-filtered model for real-time simulation of sparkles and glints. Our method simulates glints under both environment maps and point light sources in real time, with an added cost of just 10 ms per frame with full high-definition resolution. Editing material properties requires extra computations but is still real time, with an added cost of 10 ms per frame.     

A Survey of Real‐Time Crowd Rendering

In this survey we review, classify and compare existing approaches for real‐time crowd rendering. We first overview character animation techniques, as they are highly tied to crowd rendering performance, and then we analyze the state of the art in crowd rendering. We discuss different representations for level‐of‐detail (LoD) rendering of animated characters, including polygon‐based, point‐based, and image‐based techniques, and review different criteria for runtime LoD selection. Besides LoD approaches, we review classic acceleration schemes, such as frustum culling and occlusion culling, and describe how they can be adapted to handle crowds of animated characters. We also discuss specific acceleration techniques for crowd rendering, such as primitive pseudo‐instancing, palette skinning, and dynamic key‐pose caching, which benefit from current graphics hardware. We also address other factors affecting performance and realism of crowds such as lighting, shadowing, clothing and variability. Finally we provide an exhaustive comparison of the most relevant approaches in the field.     

Real‐Time Rendering Techniques with Hardware Tessellation

Graphics hardware has progressively been optimized to render more triangles with increasingly flexible shading. For highly detailed geometry, interactive applications restricted themselves to performing transforms on fixed geometry, since they could not incur the cost required to generate and transfer smooth or displaced geometry to the GPU at render time. As a result of recent advances in graphics hardware, in particular the GPU tessellation unit, complex geometry can now be generated on the fly within the GPU's rendering pipeline. This has enabled the generation and displacement of smooth parametric surfaces in real‐time applications. However, many well‐established approaches in offline rendering are not directly transferable due to the limited tessellation patterns or the parallel execution model of the tessellation stage. In this survey, we provide an overview of recent work and challenges in this topic by summarizing, discussing, and comparing methods for the rendering of smooth and highly detailed surfaces in real time.     

Volumetric Billboards

We introduce an image‐based representation, called volumetric billboards, allowing for the real‐time rendering of semi‐transparent and visually complex objects arbitrarily distributed in a 3D scene. Our representation offers full parallax effect from any viewing direction and improved anti‐aliasing of distant objects. It correctly handles transparency between multiple and possibly overlapping objects without requiring any primitive sorting. Furthermore, volumetric billboards can be easily integrated into common rasterization‐based renderers, which allows for their concurrent use with polygonal models and standard rendering techniques such as shadow‐mapping. The representation is based on volumetric images of the objects and on a dedicated real‐time volume rendering algorithm that takes advantage of the GPU geometry shader. Our examples demonstrate the applicability of the method in many cases including levels‐of‐detail representation for multiple intersecting complex objects, volumetric textures, animated objects and construction of high‐resolution objects by assembling instances of low‐resolution volumetric billboards.     

Sparse GPU Voxelization of Yarn‐Level Cloth

Most popular methods in cloth rendering rely on volumetric data in order to model complex optical phenomena such as sub‐surface scattering. These approaches are able to produce very realistic illumination results, but their volumetric representations are costly to compute and render, forfeiting any interactive feedback. In this paper, we introduce a method based on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for voxelization and visualization, suitable for both interactive and offline rendering. Recent features in the OpenGL model, like the ability to dynamically address arbitrary buffers and allocate bindless textures, are combined into our pipeline to interactively voxelize millions of polygons into a set of large three‐dimensional (3D) textures (>10⁹ elements), generating a volume with sub‐voxel accuracy, which is suitable even for high‐density woven cloth such as linen.     

具有剪切的矢量压缩立体绘制算法

利用矢量压缩的方法进行立体绘制,一个不足是根据码本生成的Pixmap图无法应用于立体投影中的每一点,为了克服这些缺点,提出了具有Shear Warp的矢量化算法,它充分发挥了矢量量化的压缩比,以及不需要解压即可直接进行体绘制的优点,有效地利用了具有Shear Warp的体绘制方法的快速和适合立体投影的优点,克服了基于矢量量化的绘制方法的不足,几乎能够达到实时的交互绘制,是一种基于网络的绘制模式。     

Visualization of Large‐Scale Urban Models through Multi‐Level Relief Impostors

In this paper, we present an efficient approach for the interactive rendering of large‐scale urban models, which can be integrated seamlessly with virtual globe applications. Our scheme fills the gap between standard approaches for distant views of digital terrains and the polygonal models required for close‐up views. Our work is oriented towards city models with real photographic textures of the building facades. At the heart of our approach is a multi‐resolution tree of the scene defining multi‐level relief impostors. Key ingredients of our approach include the pre‐computation of a small set of zenithal and oblique relief maps that capture the geometry and appearance of the buildings inside each node, a rendering algorithm combining relief mapping with projective texture mapping which uses only a small subset of the pre‐computed relief maps, and the use of wavelet compression to simulate two additional levels of the tree. Our scheme runs considerably faster than polygonal‐based approaches while producing images with higher quality than competing relief‐mapping techniques. We show both analytically and empirically that multi‐level relief impostors are suitable for interactive navigation through large urban models.     

Composed Scattering Model for Direct Volume Rendering

Based on the equation of transfer in transport theory of optical physics,a new volume rendering model,called composed scattering model(CSM),is presented.In calculating the scattering term of the equation,it is decomposed into volume scattering intensity and surface scattering intensity,and they are composed with the boundary detection operator as the weight function.This proposed model differs from the most current volume rendering models in the aspect that in CSM segmentation and illumination intensity calculation are taken as two coherent parts while in existing models they are regarded as two separate ones.This model has been applied to the direct volume rendering of 3D data sets obtained by CT and MRI.The resultant images show not only rich details but also clear boundary surfaces.CSM is demonstrated to be an accurate volume rendering model suitable for CT and MRI data sets.     

Single‐image Tomography: 3D Volumes from 2D Cranial X‐Rays

As many different 3D volumes could produce the same 2D x‐ray image, inverting this process is challenging. We show that recent deep learning‐based convolutional neural networks can solve this task. As the main challenge in learning is the sheer amount of data created when extending the 2D image into a 3D volume, we suggest firstly to learn a coarse, fixed‐resolution volume which is then fused in a second step with the input x‐ray into a high‐resolution volume. To train and validate our approach we introduce a new dataset that comprises of close to half a million computer‐simulated 2D x‐ray images of 3D volumes scanned from 175 mammalian species. Future applications of our approach include stereoscopic rendering of legacy x‐ray images, re‐rendering of x‐rays including changes of illumination, view pose or geometry. Our evaluation includes comparison to previous tomography work, previous learning methods using our data, a user study and application to a set of real x‐rays.     

反射剖面精确拟合的次表面散射计算方法

近年来,随着电影、游戏、虚拟现实应用等对真实感要求的不断提高,针对人体组织、牛奶等半透明材质的实时渲染变得越发重要.针对当前大部分次表面散射计算方法难以正确估计散射范围的问题,提出了一种全新的次表面散射计算方法用以精确表示最大散射距离.首先,针对暴力蒙特卡洛光子追踪结果进行模拟,以得到反射剖面结果.其次通过多项式模型进行反射剖面拟合,计算精确着色点处的最大散射范围.最后,提出了一种新的重要性采样方案以减少蒙特卡洛所需的采样数,进一步提高计算效率.此外,方法所需的参数仅由着色点上的反射率以及材质平均自由程提供,以便于灵活调整渲染效果.实验证明,所提模型避免了之前对于散射范围的错误估计,对材质反射率复杂的区域具有更好的渲染精度,且渲染速率满足实时要求.     

Interactive Rendering of Translucent Objects†

This paper presents a rendering method for translucent objects, in which viewpoint and illumination can be modified at interactive rates. In a preprocessing step, the impulse response to incoming light impinging at each surface point is computed and stored in two different ways: The local effect on close‐by surface points is modeled as a per‐texel filter kernel that is applied to a texture map representing the incident illumination. The global response (i.e. light shining through the object) is stored as vertex‐to‐vertex throughput factors for the triangle mesh of the object. During rendering, the illumination map for the object is computed according to the current lighting situation and then filtered by the precomputed kernels. The illumination map is also used to derive the incident illumination on the vertices which is distributed via the vertex‐to‐vertex throughput factors to the other vertices. The final image is obtained by combining the local and global response. We demonstrate the performance of our method for several models. ACM CSS: I.3.7 Computer Graphics—Three‐Dimensional Graphics and Realism Color Radiosity     

Dependency‐Free Parallel Progressive Meshes

The constantly increasing complexity of polygonal models in interactive applications poses two major problems. First, the number of primitives that can be rendered at real‐time frame rates is currently limited to a few million. Secondly, less than 45 million triangles—with vertices and normal—can be stored per gigabyte. Although the rendering time can be reduced using level‐of‐detail (LOD) algorithms, representing a model at different complexity levels, these often even increase memory consumption. Out‐of‐core algorithms solve this problem by transferring the data currently required for rendering from external devices. Compression techniques are commonly used because of the limited bandwidth. The main problem of compression and decompression algorithms is the only coarse‐grained random access. A similar problem occurs in view‐dependent LOD techniques. Because of the interdependency of split operations, the adaption rate is reduced leading to visible popping artefacts during fast movements. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for real‐time view‐dependent rendering of gigabyte‐sized models. It is based on a neighbourhood dependency‐free progressive mesh data structure. Using a per operation compression method, it is suitable for parallel random‐access decompression and out‐of‐core memory management without storing decompressed data.