EG2009
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Item Structure-Preserving Reshape for Textured Architectural Scenes(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Cabral, Marcio; Lefebvre, Sylvain; Dachsbacher, Carsten; Drettakis, GeorgeModeling large architectural environments is a difficult task due to the intricate nature of these models and the complex dependencies between the structures represented. Moreover, textures are an essential part of architectural models. While the number of geometric primitives is usually relatively low (i.e., many walls are at surfaces), textures actually contain many detailed architectural elements.We present an approach for modeling architectural scenes by reshaping and combining existing textured models, where the manipulation of the geometry and texture are tightly coupled. For geometry, preserving angles such as oor orientation or vertical walls is of key importance. We thus allow the user to interactively modify lengths of edges, while constraining angles. Our texture reshaping solution introduces a measure of directional autosimilarity to focus stretching in areas of stochastic content and to preserve details in such areas.We show results on several challenging models, and show two applications: Building complex road structures from simple initial pieces and creating complex game-levels from an existing game based on pre-existing model pieces.Item Hybrid Ambient Occlusion(The Eurographics Association, 2009) Reinbothe, Christoph K.; Boubekeur, Tamy; Alexa, Marc; D. Ebert and J. KrügerAmbient occlusion captures a subset of global illumination effects, by computing for each point of the surface the amount of incoming light from all directions and considering potential occlusion by neighboring geometry. We introduce an approach to ambient occlusion combining object and image space techniques in a deferred shading context. It is composed of three key steps: an on-the-fly voxelization of the scene, an occlusion sampling based on this voxelization and a bilateral filtering of this sampling in screen space. The result are smoothly varying ambient terms in occluded areas at interactive frame rates without any precomputation. In particular, all computations are performed dynamically on the GPU while eliminating the problem of screen-space methods, namely ignoring geometry that is not rasterized into the Z-buffer.Item Structure from silhouettes: a new paradigm for fast sketch-based design of trees(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Wither, J.; Boudon, F.; Cani, M.-P.; Godin, C.Modeling natural elements such as trees in a plausible way, while offering simple and rapid user control, is a challenge. This paper presents a method based on a new structure from silhouettes paradigm. We claim that sketching the silhouettes of foliage at multiple scales is quicker and more intuitive for a user than having to sketch each branch of a tree. This choice allows us to incorporate botanical knowledge, enabling us to infer branches that connect in a plausible way to their parent branch and have a correct distribution in 3D. We illustrate these ideas by presenting a seamless sketch-based interface, used for sketching foliage silhouettes from the scale of an entire tree to the scale of a leaf. Each sketch serves for inferring both the branches at that level and construction lines to serve as support for sub-silhouette refinement. When the user finally zooms out, the style inferred for the branching systems he has refined (in terms of branch density, angle, length distribution and shape) is duplicated to the unspecified branching systems at the same level. Meanwhile, knowledge from botany is again used for extending the branch distribution to 3D, resulting in a full, plausible 3D tree that fits the user-sketched contours. As our results show, this system can be of interest to both experts and novice users. While experts can fully specify all parts of a tree and over-sketch specific branches if required, any user can design a basic 3D tree in one or two minutes, as easily as sketching it with paper and pen.Item Simulation of two-phase flow with sub-scale droplet and bubble effects(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Mihalef, Viorel; Metaxas, Dimitris; Sussman, MarkWe present a new Eulerian-Lagrangian method for physics-based simulation of fluid flow, which includes automatic generation of sub-scale spray and bubbles. The Marker Level Set method is used to provide a simple geometric criterion for free marker generation. A filtering method, inspired from Weber number thresholding, further controls the free marker generation (in a physics-based manner). Two separate models are used, one for sub-scale droplets, the other for sub-scale bubbles. Droplets are evolved in a Newtonian manner, using a density-extension drag force field, while bubbles are evolved using a model based on Stokes Law. We show that our model for sub-scale droplet and bubble dynamics is simple to couple with a full (macro-scale) Navier-Stokes two-phase flow model and is quite powerful in its applications. Our animations include coarse grained multiphase features interacting with fine scale multiphase features.Item Meshless Approximation Methods and Applications in Physics Based Modeling and Animation(The Eurographics Association, 2009) Adams, Bart; Wicke, Martin; K. Museth and D. WeiskopfWith growing computing power, physical simulations have become increasingly important in computer graphics. Content creation for movies and interactive computer games relies heavily on physical models, and physicallyinspired interactions have proven to be a great metaphor for shape modeling. This tutorial will acquaint the reader with meshless methods for simulation and modeling. These methods differ from the more common grid or mesh-based methods in that they require less constraints on the spatial discretization. Since the algorithmic structure of simulation algorithms so critically depends on the underlying discretization, we will first treat methods for function approximation from discrete, irregular samples: smoothed particle hydrodynamics and moving least squares. This discussion will include numerical properties as well as complexity considerations. In the second part of this tutorial, we will then treat a number of applications for these approximation schemes. The smoothed particle hydrodynamics framework is used in fluid dynamics and has proven particularly popular in real-time applications. Moving least squares approximations provide higher order consistency, and are therefore suited for the simulation of elastic solids. We will cover both basic elasticity and applications in modeling.Item Fast GPU-based Adaptive Tessellation with CUDA(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Schwarz, Michael; Stamminger, MarcCompact surface descriptions like higher-order surfaces are popular representations for both modeling and animation. However, for fast graphics-hardware-assisted rendering, they usually need to be converted to triangle meshes. In this paper, we introduce a new framework for performing on-the-fly crack-free adaptive tessellation of surface primitives completely on the GPU. Utilizing CUDA and its flexible memory write capabilities, we parallelize the tessellation task at the level of single surface primitives. We are hence able to derive tessellation factors, perform surface evaluation as well as generate the tessellation topology in real-time even for large collections of primitives. We demonstrate the power of our framework by exemplarily applying it to both bicubic rational Bezier patches and PN triangles.Item Shape Decomposition using Modal Analysis(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Huang, Qi-Xing; Wicke, Martin; Adams, Bart; Guibas, LeonidasWe introduce a novel algorithm that decomposes a deformable shape into meaningful parts requiring only a single input pose. Using modal analysis, we are able to identify parts of the shape that tend to move rigidly. We define a deformation energy on the shape, enabling modal analysis to find the typical deformations of the shape. We then find a decomposition of the shape such that the typical deformations can be well approximated with deformation fields that are rigid in each part of the decomposition. We optimize for the best decomposition, which captures how the shape deforms. A hierarchical refinement scheme makes it possible to compute more detailed decompositions for some parts of the shape.Although our algorithm does not require user intervention, it is possible to control the process by directly changing the deformation energy, or interactively refining the decomposition as necessary. Due to the construction of the energy function and the properties of modal analysis, the computed decompositions are robust to changes in pose as well as meshing, noise, and even imperfections such as small holes in the surface.Item Tile-based Image Forces for Active Contours on GPU(The Eurographics Association, 2009) Kienel, Enrico; Brunnett, Guido; P. Alliez and M. MagnorActive contours have been proven to be powerful semiautomatic image segmentation tools. We present an adaptive image force computation scheme in order to minimize both computational and memory requirements. Hence, we are able to perform a fast semiautomatic contour detection in huge images. We present an efficient implementation of this approach on the basis of general purpose GPU processing providing a visual continuous active contour deformation.Item Symmetry Detection Using Feature Lines(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Bokeloh, M.; Berner, A.; Wand, M.; Seidel, H.-P.; Schilling, A.In this paper, we describe a new algorithm for detecting structural redundancy in geometric data sets. Our algorithm computes rigid symmetries, i.e., subsets of a surface model that reoccur several times within the model differing only by translation, rotation or mirroring. Our algorithm is based on matching locally coherent constellations of feature lines on the object surfaces. In comparison to previous work, the new algorithm is able to detect a large number of symmetric parts without restrictions to regular patterns or nested hierarchies. In addition, working on relevant features only leads to a strong reduction in memory and processing costs such that very large data sets can be handled. We apply the algorithm to a number of real world 3D scanner data sets, demonstrating high recognition rates for general patterns of symmetry.Item Motion Compression using Principal Geodesics Analysis(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Tournier, M.; Wu, X.; Courty, N.; Arnaud, E.; Reveret, L.Due to the growing need for large quantities of human animation data in the entertainment industry, it has become a necessity to compress motion capture sequences in order to ease their storage and transmission. We present a novel, lossy compression method for human motion data that exploits both temporal and spatial coherence. Given one motion, we first approximate the poses manifold using Principal Geodesics Analysis (PGA) in the configuration space of the skeleton. We then search this approximate manifold for poses matching end-effectors constraints using an iterative minimization algorithm that allows for real-time, data-driven inverse kinematics. The compression is achieved by only storing the approximate manifold parametrization along with the end-effectors and root joint trajectories, also compressed, in the output data. We recover poses using the IK algorithm given the end-effectors trajectories. Our experimental results show that considerable compression rates can be obtained using our method, with few reconstruction and perceptual errors.Item Range Scan Registration Using Reduced Deformable Models(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Chang, W.; Zwicker, M.We present an unsupervised method for registering range scans of deforming, articulated shapes. The key idea is to model the motion of the underlying object using a reduced deformable model. We use a linear skinning model for its simplicity and represent the weight functions on a regular grid localized to the surface geometry. This decouples the deformation model from the surface representation and allows us to deal with the severe occlusion and missing data that is inherent in range scan data. We formulate the registration problem using an objective function that enforces close alignment of the 3D data and includes an intuitive notion of joints. This leads to an optimization problem that we solve using an efficient EM-type algorithm. With our algorithm we obtain smooth deformations that accurately register pairs of range scans with significant motion and occlusion. The main advantages of our approach are that it does not require user specified markers, a template, nor manual segmentation of the surface geometry into rigid parts.Item Continuum-based Strain Limiting(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Thomaszewski, Bernhard; Pabst, Simon; Strasser, WolfgangWe present Continuum-based Strain Limiting (CSL) - a new method for limiting deformations in physically-based cloth simulations. Despite recent developments for nearly inextensible materials, the efficient simulation of general biphasic textiles and their anisotropic behavior remains challenging. Many approaches use soft materials and enforce limits on edge elongations, leading to discretization-dependent behavior. Moreover, they offer no explicit control over shearing and stretching unless specifically aligned meshes are used. Based on a continuum deformation measure, our method allows accurate control over all strain components using individual thresholds. We impose deformation limits element-wise and cast the problem as a 6x6 system of linear equations. CSL can be combined with any cloth simulator and, as a velocity filter, integrates seamlessly into standard collision handling.Item Wind projection basis for real-time animation of trees(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Diener, Julien; Rodriguez, Mathieu; Baboud, Lionel; Reveret, LionelThis paper presents a real-time method to animate complex scenes of thousands of trees under a user-controllable wind load. Firstly, modal analysis is applied to extract the main modes of deformation from the mechanical model of a 3D tree. The novelty of our contribution is to precompute a new basis of the modal stress of the tree under wind load. At runtime, this basis allows to replace the modal projection of the external forces by a direct mapping for any directional wind. We show that this approach can be efficiently implemented on graphics hardware. This modal animation can be simulated at low computation cost even for large scenes containing thousands of trees.Item A Dynamic Caching System for Rendering an Animated Crowd in Real-Time(The Eurographics Association, 2009) Lister, Wayne; Laycock, Robert G.; Day, Andrew M.; P. Alliez and M. MagnorWe present a method to accelerate the rendering of large crowds of animated characters. Recent trends have seen matrix-palette skinning become the prevalent approach due to its low memory overhead and fully dynamic geometry. However, the performance of skeletal animation remains modest in comparison to static rendering since neither temporal nor intra-frame coherency can be exploited. We cast crowd rendering as a memory-management problem and allocate a small geometry cache on the GPU within which animated characters can be stored. This serves to augment matrix-palette skinning with baked geometry and allows animation frames to be re-used by multi-pass rendering, between multiple agents and across multiple frames. Our method builds its cache dynamically and adapts to the current simulation state through use of the page-replacement algorithms traditionally employed by virtual-memory systems. In many cases this negates the need for skinning altogether and enables thousands of characters to be rendered in real-time, each independently animated and without loss of fidelity.Item Energy Aware Color Sets(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Chuang, Johnson; Weiskopf, Daniel; Moeller, TorstenWe present a design technique for colors with the purpose of lowering the energy consumption of the display device. Our approach is based on a screen space variant energy model. The result of our design is a set of distinguishable iso-lightness colors guided by perceptual principles. We present two variations of our approach. One is based on a set of discrete user-named (categorical) colors, which are analyzed according to their energy consumption. The second is based on the constrained continuous optimization of color energy in the perceptually uniform CIELAB color space. We quantitatively compare our two approaches with a traditional choice of colors, demonstrating that we typically save approximately 40 percent of the energy. The color sets are applied to examples from the 2D visualization of nominal data and volume rendering of 3D scalar fields.Item A Real-time Interactive Tool for Image Cutout(The Eurographics Association, 2009) Liu, Chen; Li, Fengxia; Zhang, Yan; Zhan, Shouyi; P. Alliez and M. MagnorWe present an interactive tool for extracting foreground objects from image in real-time. As seen from the object boundary, the segmentation is to split pixel-pairs right on the boundary. The system utilizes the user input while the user roughly paints the stroke along the object boundary. Either side of the stroke is assumed to lie in foreground or background, and the mouse trace is supposed to coarsely indicate the object contour. We use the appearance, gradient and contour information to formulate the segmentation problem to an energy minimization problem, which is solved by graph cut. The appearance model is built via local sampling, since it often provides more discriminative model in local areas than that from global sampling. In addition, our system can dynamically adjust the stroke and the optimization region for which segmentation needs to be computed. The optimization region is much smaller than the whole image. This greatly reduces the computational complexity in each iteration and also gives the system the ability of incrementally segmenting. Experiments show the effectiveness of our methods in improving the segmentation performance.Item Heightfield and spatially varying BRDF Reconstruction for Materials with Interreflections(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Ruiters, Roland; Klein, ReinhardPhoto-realistic reproduction of material appearance from images has widespread use in applications ranging from movies over advertising to virtual prototyping. A common approach to this task is to reconstruct the small scale geometry of the sample and to capture the reflectance properties using spatially varying BRDFs. For this, multi-view and photometric stereo reconstruction can be used, both of which are limited regarding the amount of either view or light directions and suffer from either low- or high-frequency artifacts, respectively. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm combining both techniques to recover heightfields and spatially varying BRDFs while at the same time overcoming the above mentioned drawbacks. Our main contribution is a novel objective function which allows for the reconstruction of a heightfield and high quality SVBRDF including view dependent effects. Thereby, our method also avoids both low and high frequency artifacts. Additionally, our algorithm takes inter-reflections into account allowing for the reconstruction of undisturbed representations of the underlying material. In our experiments, including synthetic and real-world data, we show that our approach is superior to state-of-the-art methods regarding reconstruction error as well as visual impression. Both the reconstructed geometry and the recovered SVBRDF are highly accurate, resulting in a faithful reproduction of the materials characteristic appearance, which is of paramount importance in the context of material rendering.Item Adaptive Caustic Maps Using Deferred Shading(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Wyman, Chris; Nichols, GregItem Real Time Animation of Virtual Humans: A Trade-off Between Naturalness and Control(The Eurographics Association, 2009) Welbergen, H. van; Basten, B. J. H. van; Egges, A.; Ruttkay, Zs.; Overmars, M. H.; M. Pauly and G. GreinerVirtual humans are employed in many interactive applications using 3D virtual environments, including (serious) games. The motion of such virtual humans should look realistic (or natural ) and allow interaction with the surroundings and other (virtual) humans. Current animation techniques differ in the trade-off they offer between their motion naturalness and the amount of control that can be exerted over the motion. We give an overview of these techniques, focusing on the exact trade-offs made. We show how to parameterize, combine (on different body parts) and concatenate motions to gain control. We discuss several aspects of motion naturalness and show how it can be evaluated. We conclude by showing the promise of combinations of different animation paradigms to enhance both naturalness and control.Item Genuinity Signatures: Designing Signatures for Verifying 3D Object Genuinity(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Aliaga, Daniel G.; Atallah, Mikhail J.3D computer graphics models and digitally-controlled manufacturing have come together to enable the design, visualization, simulation, and automated creation of complex 3D objects. In our work, we propose and implement a framework for designing computer graphics objects and digitally manufacturing them such that no adversary can make imitations or counterfeit copies of the physical object, even if the adversary has a large number of original copies of the object, knowledge of the original object design, and has manufacturing precision that is comparable to or superior to that of the legitimate creator of the object. Our approach is to design and embed a signature on the surface of the object which acts as a certificate of genuinity of the object. The signature is detectable by a signature-reading device, based on methods in computer graphics and computer vision, which contains some of the secret information that was used when marking the physical object. Further, the compromise of a signature-reading device by an adversary who is able to extract all its secrets, does not enable the adversary to create counterfeit objects that fool other readers, thereby still enabling reliable copy detection. We implemented a prototype of our scheme end-to-end, including the production of the physical object and the genuinity-testing device.