Interactive High‐Quality Visualization of Higher‐Order Finite Elements

Higher‐order finite element methods have emerged as an important discretization scheme for simulation. They are increasingly used in contemporary numerical solvers, generating a new class of data that must be analyzed by scientists and engineers. Currently available visualization tools for this type of data are either batch oriented or limited to certain cell types and polynomial degrees. Other approaches approximate higher‐order data by resampling resulting in trade‐offs in interactivity and quality. To overcome these limitations, we have developed a distributed visualization system which allows for interactive exploration of non‐conforming unstructured grids, resulting from space‐time discontinuous Galerkin simulations, in which each cell has its own higher‐order polynomial solution. Our system employs GPU‐based raycasting for direct volume rendering of complex grids which feature non‐convex, curvilinear cells with varying polynomial degree. Frequency‐based adaptive sampling accounts for the high variations along rays. For distribution across a GPU cluster, the initial object‐space partitioning is determined by cell characteristics like the polynomial degree and is adapted at runtime by a load balancing mechanism. The performance and utility of our system is evaluated for different aeroacoustic simulations involving the propagation of shock fronts.     

Mesh Decomposition with Cross‐Boundary Brushes

We present a new intuitive UI, which we call cross‐boundary brushes, for interactive mesh decomposition. The user roughly draws one or more strokes across a desired cut and our system automatically returns a best cut running through all the strokes. By the different natures of part components (i.e., semantic parts) and patch components (i.e., flatter surface patches) in general models, we design two corresponding brushes: part‐brush and patch‐brush. These two types of brushes share a common user interface, enabling easy switch between them. The part‐brush executes a cut along an isoline of a harmonic field driven by the user‐specified strokes. We show that the inherent smoothness of the harmonic field together with a carefully designed isoline selection scheme lead to segmentation results that are insensitive to noise, pose, tessellation and variation in user's strokes. Our patch‐brush uses a novel facet‐based surface metric that alleviates sensitivity to noise and fine details common in region‐growing algorithms. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our cutting tools can produce user‐desired segmentations for a wide variety of models even with single strokes. We also show that our tools outperform the state‐of‐art interactive segmentation tools in terms of ease of use and segmentation quality.     

BetweenIT: An Interactive Tool for Tight Inbetweening

The generation of inbetween frames that interpolate a given set of key frames is a major component in the production of a 2D feature animation. Our objective is to considerably reduce the cost of the inbetweening phase by offering an intuitive and effective interactive environment that automates inbetweening when possible while allowing the artist to guide, complement, or override the results. Tight inbetweens, which interpolate similar key frames, are particularly time‐consuming and tedious to draw. Therefore, we focus on automating these high‐precision and expensive portions of the process. We have designed a set of user‐guided semi‐automatic techniques that fit well with current practice and minimize the number of required artist‐gestures. We present a novel technique for stroke interpolation from only two keys which combines a stroke motion constructed from logarithmic spiral vertex trajectories with a stroke deformation based on curvature averaging and twisting warps. We discuss our system in the context of a feature animation production environment and evaluate our approach with real production data.     

Hybrid Simulation of Miscible Mixing with Viscous Fingering

By modeling mass transfer phenomena, we simulate solids and liquids dissolving or changing to other substances. We also deal with the very small‐scale phenomena that occur when a fluid spreads out at the interface of another fluid. We model the pressure at the interfaces between fluids with Darcy's Law and represent the viscous fingering phenomenon in which a fluid interface spreads out with a fractal‐like shape. We use hybrid grid‐based simulation and smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) to simulate intermolecular diffusion and attraction using particles at a computable scale. We have produced animations showing fluids mixing and objects dissolving.     

Implicit Decals: Interactive Editing of Repetitive Patterns on Surfaces

Texture mapping is an essential component for creating 3D models and is widely used in both the game and the movie industries. Creating texture maps has always been a complex task and existing methods carefully balance flexibility with ease of use. One difficulty in using texturing is the repeated placement of individual textures over larger areas. In this paper, we propose a method which uses decals to place images onto a model. Our method allows the decals to compete for space and to deform as they are being pushed by other decals. A spherical field function is used to determine the position and the size of each decal and the deformation applied to fit the decals. The decals may span multiple objects with heterogeneous representations. Our method does not require an explicit parametrization of the model. As such, varieties of patterns, including repeated patterns like rocks, tiles and scales can be mapped. We have implemented the method using the GPU where placement, size and orientation of thousands of decals are manipulated in real time.     

Locomotion Skills for Insects with Sample‐based Controller

Natural‐looking insect animation is very difficult to simulate. The fast movement and small scale of insects often challenge the standard motion capture techniques. As for the manual key‐framing or physics‐driven methods, significant amounts of time and efforts are necessary due to the delicate structure of the insect, which prevents practical applications. In this paper, we address this challenge by presenting a two‐level control framework to efficiently automate the modeling and authoring of insects’ locomotion. On the top level, we design a Triangle Placement Engine to automatically determine the location and orientation of insects’ foot contacts, given the user‐defined trajectory and settings, including speed, load, path and terrain etc. On the low‐level, we relate the Central Pattern Generator to the triangle profiles with the assistance of a Controller Look‐Up Table to fast simulate the physically‐based movement of insects. With our approach, animators can directly author insects’ behavior among a wide range of locomotion repertoire, including walking along a specified path or on an uneven terrain, dynamically adjusting to external perturbations and collectively transporting prey back to the nest.     

Structure Aware Visual Cryptography

Visual cryptography is an encryption technique that hides a secret image by distributing it between some shared images made up of seemingly random black‐and‐white pixels. Extended visual cryptography (EVC) goes further in that the shared images instead represent meaningful binary pictures. The original approach to EVC suffered from low contrast, so later papers considered how to improve the visual quality of the results by enhancing contrast of the shared images. This work further improves the appearance of the shared images by preserving edge structures within them using a framework of dithering followed by a detail recovery operation. We are also careful to suppress noise in smooth areas.     

Adaptive multi‐scale analysis for point‐based surface editing

This paper presents a tool that enables the direct editing of surface features in large point‐clouds or meshes. This is made possible by a novel multi‐scale analysis of unstructured point‐clouds that automatically extracts the number of relevant features together with their respective scale all over the surface. Then, combining this ingredient with an adequate multi‐scale decomposition allows us to directly enhance or reduce each feature in an independent manner. Our feature extraction is based on the analysis of the scale‐variations of locally fitted surface primitives combined with unsupervised learning techniques. Our tool may be applied either globally or locally, and millions of points are handled in real‐time. The resulting system enables users to accurately edit complex geometries with minimal interaction.     

Single‐shot High Dynamic Range Imaging Using Coded Electronic Shutter

Typical high dynamic range (HDR) imaging approaches based on multiple images have difficulties in handling moving objects and camera shakes, suffering from the ghosting effect and the loss of sharpness in the output HDR image. While there exist a variety of solutions for resolving such limitations, most of the existing algorithms are susceptible to complex motions, saturation, and occlusions. In this paper, we propose an HDR imaging approach using the coded electronic shutter which can capture a scene with row‐wise varying exposures in a single image. Our approach enables a direct extension of the dynamic range of the captured image without using multiple images, by photometrically calibrating rows with different exposures. Due to the concurrent capture of multiple exposures, misalignments of moving objects are naturally avoided with significant reduction in the ghosting effect. To handle the issues with under‐/over‐exposure, noise, and blurs, we present a coherent HDR imaging process where the problems are resolved one by one at each step. Experimental results with real photographs, captured using a coded electronic shutter, demonstrate that our method produces a high quality HDR images without the ghosting and blur artifacts.     

Extracting Microfacet‐based BRDF Parameters from Arbitrary Materials with Power Iterations

We introduce a novel fitting procedure that takes as input an arbitrary material, possibly anisotropic, and automatically converts it to a microfacet BRDF. Our algorithm is based on the property that the distribution of microfacets may be retrieved by solving an eigenvector problem that is built solely from backscattering samples. We show that the eigenvector associated to the largest eigenvalue is always the only solution to this problem, and compute it using the power iteration method. This approach is straightforward to implement, much faster to compute, and considerably more robust than solutions based on nonlinear optimizations. In addition, we provide simple conversion procedures of our fits into both Beckmann and GGX roughness parameters, and discuss the advantages of microfacet slope space to make our fits editable. We apply our method to measured materials from two large databases that include anisotropic materials, and demonstrate the benefits of spatially varying roughness on texture mapped geometric models.