Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 115
  • Item
    Interactive Low-Cost Wind Simulation For Cities
    (The Eurographics Association, 2016) Rando, Eduard; Muñoz, Imanol; Patow, Gustavo; Vincent Tourre and Filip Biljecki
    Wind is an ubiquitous phenomenon on earth, and its behavior is well studied in many fields. However, its study inside a urban landscape remains an elusive target for large areas given the high complexity of the interactions between wind and buildings. In this paper we propose a lightweight 2D wind simulation in cities that is efficient enough to run at interactive frame-rates, but also accurate enough to provide some prediction capabilities. The proposed algorithm is based on the Lattice-Boltzmann Method (LBM), which consists of a regular lattice that represents the fluid in discrete locations, and a set of equations to simulate its flow. We perform all the computations of the LBM in CUDA on graphics processors for accelerating the calculations.
  • Item
    Geometry and Attribute Compression for Voxel Scenes
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Dado, Bas; Kol, Timothy R.; Bauszat, Pablo; Thiery, Jean-Marc; Eisemann, Elmar; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
    Voxel-based approaches are today's standard to encode volume data. Recently, directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) were successfully used for compressing sparse voxel scenes as well, but they are restricted to a single bit of (geometry) information per voxel. We present a method to compress arbitrary data, such as colors, normals, or reflectance information. By decoupling geometry and voxel data via a novel mapping scheme, we are able to apply the DAG principle to encode the topology, while using a palette-based compression for the voxel attributes, leading to a drastic memory reduction. Our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques and is well-suited for GPU architectures. We achieve real-time performance on commodity hardware for colored scenes with up to 17 hierarchical levels (a 128K3 voxel resolution), which are stored fully in core.
  • Item
    MCFTLE: Monte Carlo Rendering of Finite-Time Lyapunov Exponent Fields
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Günther, Tobias; Kuhn, Alexander; Theisel, Holger; Kwan-Liu Ma and Giuseppe Santucci and Jarke van Wijk
    Traditionally, Lagrangian fields such as finite-time Lyapunov exponents (FTLE) are precomputed on a discrete grid and are ray casted afterwards. This, however, introduces both grid discretization errors and sampling errors during ray marching. In this work, we apply a progressive, view-dependent Monte Carlo-based approach for the visualization of such Lagrangian fields in time-dependent flows. Our approach avoids grid discretization and ray marching errors completely, is consistent, and has a low memory consumption. The system provides noisy previews that converge over time to an accurate high-quality visualization. Compared to traditional approaches, the proposed system avoids explicitly predefined fieldline seeding structures, and uses a Monte Carlo sampling strategy named Woodcock tracking to distribute samples along the view ray. An acceleration of this sampling strategy requires local upper bounds for the FTLE values, which we progressively acquire during the rendering. Our approach is tailored for high-quality visualizations of complex FTLE fields and is guaranteed to faithfully represent detailed ridge surface structures as indicators for Lagrangian coherent structures (LCS). We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by using a set of analytic test cases and real-world numerical simulations.
  • Item
    Minimal Sampling for Effective Acquisition of Anisotropic BRDFs
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Vávra, Radomir; Filip, Jiri; Eitan Grinspun and Bernd Bickel and Yoshinori Dobashi
    BRDFs are commonly used for material appearance representation in applications ranging from gaming and the movie industry, to product design and specification. Most applications rely on isotropic BRDFs due to their better availability as a result of their easier acquisition process. On the other hand, anisotropic BRDF due to their structure-dependent anisotropic highlights, are more challenging to measure and process. This paper thus leverages the measurement process of anisotropic BRDF by representing such BRDF by the collection of isotropic BRDFs. Our method relies on an anisotropic BRDF database decomposition into training isotropic slices forming a linear basis, where appropriate sparse samples are identified using numerical optimization. When an unknown anisotropic BRDF is measured, these samples are repeatably captured in a small set of azimuthal directions. All collected samples are then used for an entire measured BRDF reconstruction from a linear isotropic basis. Typically, below 100 samples are sufficient for the capturing of main visual features of complex anisotropic materials, and we provide a minimal directional samples to be regularly measured at each sample rotation. We conclude, that even simple setups relying on five bidirectional samples (maximum of five stationary sensors/lights) in combination with eight rotations (rotation stage for specimen) can yield a promising reconstruction of anisotropic behavior. Next, we outline extension of the proposed approach to adaptive sampling of anisotropic BRDF to gain even better performance. Finally, we show that our method allows using standard geometries, including industrial multi-angle reflectometers, for the fast measurement of anisotropic BRDFs.
  • Item
    A General Micro-flake Model for Predicting the Appearance of Car Paint
    (The Eurographics Association, 2016) Ergun, Serkan; Önel, Sermet; Ozturk, Aydin; Elmar Eisemann and Eugene Fiume
    We present an approximate model for predicting the appearance of car paint from its paint composition. Representing the appearance of car paint is not trivial because of its layered structure which is composed of anisotropic scattering media. The Radiative Transfer Equation (RTE) is commonly used to represent the multiple scattering for the underlying structures. A number of techniques including the Monte Carlo approach, the discrete ordinates, the adding-doubling method, the Eddington approximation, as well as the 2-stream and diffusion approximations have been proposed so far to improve visualization accuracy. Each of these techniques hold advantages over the others when their appropriate conditions are met. The adding-doubling method, in particular, is recognized to be computationally simple and accurate. Jakob et al. [JAM 10] has generalized the RTE for anisotropic scattering structures and proposed to use a micro-flake model based on double-sided specularly reflecting flakes. They also developed an anisotropic diffusion approximation to solve the corresponding RTE. In this paper, considering the translucent micro-flakes we proposed to use a modified version of the model which was developed by Jakob et al. We utilized the adding-doubling method instead of the diffusion-approximation for the new micro-flake model. The proposed approach also provided a good ground for data compression used in the evaluation of RTE. Empirical comparisons have been made to assess the accuracy and computational efficiency of the proposed model. Based on the sample data, we showed that our model provides visually satisfactory results for the appearance of multi-layered car paint.
  • Item
    Spatial Matching of Animated Meshes
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Seo, Hyewon; Cordier, Frederic; Eitan Grinspun and Bernd Bickel and Yoshinori Dobashi
    This paper presents a new technique which makes use of deformation and motion properties between animated meshes for finding their spatial correspondences. Given a pair of animated meshes exhibiting a semantically similar motion, we compute a sparse set of feature points on each mesh and compute spatial correspondences among them so that points with similar motion behavior are put in correspondence. At the core of our technique is our new, dynamic feature descriptor named AnimHOG, which encodes local deformation characteristics. AnimHOG is ob-tained by computing the gradient of a scalar field inside the spatiotemporal neighborhood of a point of interest, where the scalar values are obtained from the deformation characteristic associated with each vertex and at each frame. The final matching has been formulated as a discreet optimization problem that finds the matching of each feature point on the source mesh so that the descriptor similarity between the corresponding feature pairs as well as compatibility and consistency as measured across the pairs of correspondences are maximized. Consequently, reliable correspondences can be found even among the meshes of very different shape, as long as their motions are similar. We demonstrate the performance of our technique by showing the good quality of matching results we obtained on a number of animated mesh pairs.
  • Item
    A Deferred Rendering Pipeline Including a Global Illumination Model for Atmospheric Scattering and Transparency
    (The Eurographics Association, 2016) Heppner, S.; Dransfeld, M.; Domik, G.; Oleg Lobachev
    Abstract This poster presents suitable global illumination models for atmospheric scattering in outdoor scenes combined with a deferred rendering pipeline which offers the possibility of rendering transparent objects. The use case is a HIL simulation for camera based ADAS tests that require a realistic rendering of outdoor scenes.
  • Item
    A Macroblock Optimization for Grid-based Nonlinear Elasticity
    (The Eurographics Association, 2016) Mitchell, Nathan; Doescher, Michael; Sifakis, Eftychios; Ladislav Kavan and Chris Wojtan
    We introduce a new numerical approach for the solution of grid-based discretizations of nonlinear elastic models. Our method targets the linearized system of equations within each iteration of the Newton method, and combines elements of a direct factorization scheme with an iterative Conjugate Gradient method. The goal of our hybrid scheme is to inherit as many of the advantages of its constituent approaches, while curtailing several of their respective drawbacks. In particular, our algorithm converges in far fewer iterations than Conjugate Gradients, especially for systems with less-than-ideal conditioning. On the other hand, our approach largely avoids the storage footprint and memory-bound nature of direct methods, such as sparse Cholesky factorization, while offering very direct opportunities for both SIMD and thread-based parallelism. Conceptually, our method aggregates a rectangular neighborhood of grid cells (typically a 16x8x8 subgrid) into a composite element that we refer to as a ''macroblock''. Similar to conventional tetrahedral or hexahedral elements, macroblocks receive nodal inputs (e.g., displacements) and compute nodal outputs (e.g., forces). However, this input/output interface now only includes nodes on the boundary of the 16x8x8 macroblock; interior nodes are always solved exactly, by means of a direct, highly optimized solver. Models built from macroblocks are solved using Conjugate Gradients, which is accelerated due to the reduced number of degrees of freedom and improved robustness against poor conditioning thanks to the direct solver within each macroblock. We explain how we attain these benefits with just a small increase of the per-iteration cost over the simplest traditional solvers.
  • Item
    Weathering of Urban Scenes: Challenges and Possible Solutions
    (The Eurographics Association, 2016) Muñoz-Pandiella, I.; Bosch, C.; Mérillou, N.; Pueyo, X.; Mérillou, S; Patow, G.; Reinhard Klein and Holly Rushmeier
    In this paper, we propose to discuss on one of the main challenges in realistic rendering of urban scenes: changes in appearance over time within a urban context. After studying the previous work on weathering techniques, we have found that there is a lack of estimation for some important environmental parameters (such as sun radiation) that have a wrong impact on weathering phenomena simulation and, thus, on the appearance of virtual objects. We also think that such a problem needs to be addressed on large urban models. Here, we discuss some possible solutions we have studied in our research. These solutions are focused on screen-space techniques, in order to efficiently compute those factors and use them to interactively generate weathering effects.
  • Item
    Compressed Multiresolution Hierarchies for High-Quality Precomputed Shadows
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Scandolo, Leonardo; Bauszat, Pablo; Eisemann, Elmar; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
    The quality of shadow mapping is traditionally limited by texture resolution. We present a novel lossless compression scheme for high-resolution shadow maps based on precomputed multiresolution hierarchies. Traditional multiresolution trees can compactly represent homogeneous regions of shadow maps at coarser levels, but require many nodes for fine details. By conservatively adapting the depth map, we can significantly reduce the tree complexity. Our proposed method offers high compression rates, avoids quantization errors, exploits coherency along all data dimensions, and is well-suited for GPU architectures. Our approach can be applied for coherent shadow maps as well, enabling several applications, including high-quality soft shadows and dynamic lights moving on fixed-trajectories.