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Now showing 1 - 10 of 65
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    A Multifragment Renderer for Material Aging Visualization
    (The Eurographics Association, 2018) Adamopoulos, Georgios; Moutafidou, Anastasia; Drosou, Anastasios; Tzovaras, Dimitrios; Fudos, Ioannis; Jain, Eakta and Kosinka, Jirí
    People involved in curatorial work and in preservation/conservation tasks need to understand exactly the nature of aging and to prevent it with minimal preservation work. In this scenario, it is of extreme importance to have tools to produce and visualize digital representations and models of visual surface appearance and material properties, to help the scientist understand how they evolve over time and under particular environmental conditions. We report on the development of a multifragment renderer for visualizing and combining the results of simulated aging of artwork objects. Several natural aging processes manifest themselves through change of color, fading, deformations or cracks. Furthermore, changes in the materials underneath the visible layers may be detected or simulated.
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    High Dynamic Range Point Clouds for Real-Time Relighting
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Sabbadin, Manuele; Palma, Gianpaolo; BANTERLE, FRANCESCO; Boubekeur, Tamy; Cignoni, Paolo; Lee, Jehee and Theobalt, Christian and Wetzstein, Gordon
    Acquired 3D point clouds make possible quick modeling of virtual scenes from the real world.With modern 3D capture pipelines, each point sample often comes with additional attributes such as normal vector and color response. Although rendering and processing such data has been extensively studied, little attention has been devoted using the light transport hidden in the recorded per-sample color response to relight virtual objects in visual effects (VFX) look-dev or augmented reality (AR) scenarios. Typically, standard relighting environment exploits global environment maps together with a collection of local light probes to reflect the light mood of the real scene on the virtual object. We propose instead a unified spatial approximation of the radiance and visibility relationships present in the scene, in the form of a colored point cloud. To do so, our method relies on two core components: High Dynamic Range (HDR) expansion and real-time Point-Based Global Illumination (PBGI). First, since an acquired color point cloud typically comes in Low Dynamic Range (LDR) format, we boost it using a single HDR photo exemplar of the captured scene that can cover part of it. We perform this expansion efficiently by first expanding the dynamic range of a set of renderings of the point cloud and then projecting these renderings on the original cloud. At this stage, we propagate the expansion to the regions not covered by the renderings or with low-quality dynamic range by solving a Poisson system. Then, at rendering time, we use the resulting HDR point cloud to relight virtual objects, providing a diffuse model of the indirect illumination propagated by the environment. To do so, we design a PBGI algorithm that exploits the GPU's geometry shader stage as well as a new mipmapping operator, tailored for G-buffers, to achieve real-time performances. As a result, our method can effectively relight virtual objects exhibiting diffuse and glossy physically-based materials in real time. Furthermore, it accounts for the spatial embedding of the object within the 3D environment. We evaluate our approach on manufactured scenes to assess the error introduced at every step from the perfect ground truth. We also report experiments with real captured data, covering a range of capture technologies, from active scanning to multiview stereo reconstruction.
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    Sequences with Low-Discrepancy Blue-Noise 2-D Projections
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Perrier, Hélène; Coeurjolly, David; Xie, Feng; Pharr, Matt; Hanrahan, Pat; Ostromoukhov, Victor; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
    Distributions of samples play a very important role in rendering, affecting variance, bias and aliasing in Monte-Carlo and Quasi-Monte Carlo evaluation of the rendering equation. In this paper, we propose an original sampler which inherits many important features of classical low-discrepancy sequences (LDS): a high degree of uniformity of the achieved distribution of samples, computational efficiency and progressive sampling capability. At the same time, we purposely tailor our sampler in order to improve its spectral characteristics, which in turn play a crucial role in variance reduction, anti-aliasing and improving visual appearance of rendering. Our sampler can efficiently generate sequences of multidimensional points, whose power spectra approach so-called Blue-Noise (BN) spectral property while preserving low discrepancy (LD) in certain 2-D projections. In our tile-based approach, we perform permutations on subsets of the original Sobol LDS. In a large space of all possible permutations, we select those which better approach the target BN property, using pair-correlation statistics. We pre-calculate such ''good'' permutations for each possible Sobol pattern, and store them in a lookup table efficiently accessible in runtime. We provide a complete and rigorous proof that such permutations preserve dyadic partitioning and thus the LDS properties of the point set in 2-D projections. Our construction is computationally efficient, has a relatively low memory footprint and supports adaptive sampling. We validate our method by performing spectral/discrepancy/aliasing analysis of the achieved distributions, and provide variance analysis for several target integrands of theoretical and practical interest.
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    Smooth Blended Subdivision Shading
    (The Eurographics Association, 2018) Bakker, Jelle; Barendrecht, Pieter J.; Kosinka, Jiri; Diamanti, Olga and Vaxman, Amir
    The concept known as subdivision shading aims at improving the shading of subdivision surfaces. It is based on the subdivision of normal vectors associated with the control net of the surface. By either using the resulting subdivided normal field directly, or blending it with the normal field of the limit surface, renderings of higher visual smoothness can be obtained. In this work we propose a different and more versatile approach to blend the two normal fields, yielding not only better results, but also a proof that our blended normal field is C1.
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    Rendering Transparent Materials with a Complex Refractive Index: Semi-conductor and Conductor Thin Layers
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Gerardin, Morgane; Holzschuch, Nicolas; Martinetto, Pauline; Klein, Reinhard and Rushmeier, Holly
    During physical simulation of light transport, we separate materials between conductors and dielectrics. The former have a complex refractive index and are treated as opaque, the latter a real one and are treated as transparent. However, thin layers with a complex refractive index can become transparent if their thickness is small compared to the extinction coeffcient. This happens with thin metallic layers, but also with many pigments that are semiconductors: their extinction coeffcient (the imaginary part of their refractive index) is close to zero for part of the visible spectrum. Spectral effects inside these thin layers (attenuation and interference) result in dramatic color changes.
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    Fresnel Equations Considered Harmful
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Hoffman, Naty; Klein, Reinhard and Rushmeier, Holly
    Microfacet shading models in film and game production have long used a simple approximation to the Fresnel equations, published by Schlick in 1994. Recently a growing number of film studios have transitioned to using the full Fresnel reflectance equations in lieu of Schlick's approximation. This transition has been facilitated by Gulbrandsen's 2014 parameterization which uses reflectance and edge tint instead of eta and kappa. Our recent investigations have found some unexpected drawbacks to this approach. In this presentation, we will show that in the context of RGB rendering (still by far the most common modality in film production), the Fresnel equations are actually less physically principled than Schlick's approximation. In addition, they are less robust in practice and less amenable to authoring. Most surprisingly, as commonly used the Fresnel equations result in less accurate matches to measured materials, compared to Schlick's approximation. The presentation primarily discusses metal reflectance, since our investigations so far have focused on metals.
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    Stratified Sampling of Projected Spherical Caps
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Ureña, Carlos; Georgiev, Iliyan; Jakob, Wenzel and Hachisuka, Toshiya
    We present a method for uniformly sampling points inside the projection of a spherical cap onto a plane through the sphere's center. To achieve this, we devise two novel area-preserving mappings from the unit square to this projection, which is often an ellipse but generally has a more complex shape. Our maps allow for low-variance rendering of direct illumination from finite and infinite (e.g. sun-like) spherical light sources by sampling their projected solid angle in a stratified manner. We discuss the practical implementation of our maps and show significant quality improvement over traditional uniform spherical cap sampling in a production renderer.
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    Approximate Program Smoothing Using Mean-Variance Statistics, with Application to Procedural Shader Bandlimiting
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Yang, Yuting; Barnes, Connelly; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
    We introduce a general method to approximate the convolution of a program with a Gaussian kernel. This results in the program being smoothed. Our compiler framework models intermediate values in the program as random variables, by using mean and variance statistics. We decompose the input program into atomic parts and relate the statistics of the different parts of the smoothed program. We give several approximate smoothing rules that can be used for the parts of the program. These include an improved variant of Dorn et al. [DBLW15], a novel adaptive Gaussian approximation, Monte Carlo sampling, and compactly supported kernels. Our adaptive Gaussian approximation handles multivariate Gaussian distributed inputs, gives exact results for a larger class of programs than previous work, and is accurate to the second order in the standard deviation of the kernel for programs with certain analytic properties. Because each expression in the program can have multiple approximation choices, we use a genetic search to automatically select the best approximations. We apply this framework to the problem of automatically bandlimiting procedural shader programs. We evaluate our method on a variety of geometries and complex shaders, including shaders with parallax mapping, animation, and spatially varying statistics. The resulting smoothed shader programs outperform previous approaches both numerically and aesthetically.
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    Interactive Rendering of Giga-Particle Fluid Simulations
    (The Eurographics Association, 2014) Reichl, Florian; Chajdas, Matthäus G.; Schneider, Jens; Westermann, Rüdiger; Ingo Wald and Jonathan Ragan-Kelley
    We describe the design of an interactive rendering system for particle-based fluid simulations comprising hundreds of millions of particles per time step. We present a novel binary voxel representation for particle positions in combination with random jitter to drastically reduce memory and bandwidth requirements. To avoid a time-consuming preprocess and restrict the workload to what is seen, the construction of this representation is embedded into frontto- back GPU ray-casting. For high speed rendering, we ray-cast spheres and extend on total-variation-based image de-noising models to smooth the fluid surface according to data specific boundary conditions. The regular voxel structure permits highly efficient ray-sphere intersection testing as well as classification of foam particles at runtime on the GPU. Foam particles are rendered volumetrically by reconstructing densities from the binary representation on-the-fly. The particular design of our system allows scrubbing through high-resolution animated fluids at interactive rates.
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    Projectional Radiography Simulator: an Interactive Teaching Tool
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Sujar, Aaron; Kelly, Graham; García, Marcos; Vidal, Franck; Vidal, Franck P. and Tam, Gary K. L. and Roberts, Jonathan C.
    Radiographers need to know a broad range of knowledge about X-ray radiography, which can be specific to each part of the body. Due to the harmfulness of the ionising radiation used, teaching and training using real patients is not ethical. Students have limited access to real X-ray rooms and anatomic phantoms during their studies. Books, and now web apps, containing a set of static pictures are then often used to illustrate clinical cases. In this study, we have built an Interactive X-ray Projectional Simulator using a deformation algorithm with a real-time X-ray image simulator. Users can load various anatomic models and the tool enables virtual model positioning in order to set a specific position and see the corresponding X-ray image. It allows teachers to simulate any particular X-ray projection in a lecturing environment without using real patients and avoiding any kind of radiation risk. This tool also allows the students to reproduce the important parameters of a real X-ray machine in a safe environment. We have performed a face and content validation in which our tool proves to be realistic (72% of the participants agreed that the simulations are visually realistic), useful (67%) and suitable (78%) for teaching X-ray radiography.