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Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Modeling of Skylight and Rendering of Outdoor Scenes
    (Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1993) Tadamura, Katsumi; Nakamae, Eihachiro; Kaneda, Kazufumi; Baba, Masashi; Yamashita, Hideo and Nishita, Tomoyuki
    Photorealistic animated images are extremely effective for pre-evaluating visual impact of city renewal and construction of tall buildings. In order to generate a photorealistic image not only the direct sunlight but also skylight must be considered.This paper proposes a method of high-fidelity image generation for photorealistic outdoor scenes based on the following ideas: * 1The intensity distribution of skylight taking account of scattering and absorption due to particles in the atmosphere which coincides with CIE standard skylight luminance functions is sought, and realistic images considering about spectrum distribution of skylight for any altitude of the sun can be easily and accurately displayed. * 2A rectangular parallelepiped with a specialized distribution of intensity simulating the skylight is introduced for efficient calculation of illumination due to skylight, and by employing a graphics hardware calculation of the skylight illuminance taking into account shadow effects is obtained with high efficiency- these techniques can be used to generate sequences of images, making animations possible at far lower calculation cost than previous methods.
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    A Modeling and Rendering Method for Snow by Using Metaballs
    (Blackwell Publishers Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1997) Nishita, Tomoyuki; Iwasaki, Hiroshi; Dobashi, Yoshinori; Nakamae, Eihachiro
    The display of natural scenes such as mountains, trees, the earth as viewed from space, the sea, and waves have been attempted. Here a method to realistically display snow is proposed.In order to achieve this, two important elements have to be considered, namely the shape and shading model of snow, based on the physical phenomenon. In this paper, a method for displaying snow fallen onto objects, including curved surfaces and snow scattered by objects, such as skis, is proposed. Snow should be treated as particles with a density distribution since it consists of water particles, ice particles, and air molecules. In order to express the material property of snow, the phase functions of the particles must be taken into account, and it is well-known that the color of snow is white because of the multiple scattering of light.This paper describes a calculation method for light scattering due to snow particles taking into account both multiple scattering and sky light, and the modeling of snow.
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    A Method for Displaying Metaballs by using Bezier Clipping
    (Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1994) Nishita, Tomoyuki; Nakamae, Eihachiro
    For rendering curved surfaces, one of the most popular techniques is metaballs, an implicit model based on isosurfaces of potential fields. This technique is suitable for deformable objects and CSG model.For rendering metaballs, intersection tests between rays and isosurfaces are required. By defining the higher degree of functions for the field functions, richer capability can be expected, i.e., the smoother surfaces. However, one of the problems is that the intersection between the ray and isosurfaces can not be solved analytically for such a high degree function. Even though the field function is expressed by degree six polynomial in this paper (that means the degree six equation should be solved for the intersection test), in our algorithm, expressing the field function on the ray by Bezier functions and employing Bezier Clipping, the root of this function can be solved very effectively and precisely.This paper also discusses a deformed distribution function such as ellipsoids and a method displaying transparent objects such as clouds.
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    A New Radiosity Approach Using Area Sampling for Parametric Patches
    (Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1993) Nishita, Tomoyuki; Nakamae, Eihachiro
    A high precision illumination model is indispensable for lighting simulation and realistic image synthesis. For the purpose of improving realism, research on global illumination has been done, and several papers on radiosity methods have been presented. In the most recently proposed methods, the shapes of light sources and objects are restricted to polygons or simple curved surfaces. We present a more general method which can handle the kind of free-form surfaces widely used in industrial products and in architecture. The method proposed here solves the problem of the interreflection of light (i.e., radiosities) between patches, and form-factors, which play an important role in this process, are precisely calculated without aliasing through the use of an area sampling method (i.e., pyramid tracing). Furthermore the method can handle both non-uniform intensity curved sources and non-diffuse surfaces.
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    Fast Photo-Realistic Rendering of Trees in Daylight
    (Blackwell Publishers, Inc and the Eurographics Association, 2003) Qin, Xueying; Nakamae, Eihachiro; Tadamura, Katsumi; Nagai, Yasuo
    We propose a fast approach for photo-realistic rendering of trees under various kinds of daylight, which is particularlyuseful for the environmental assessment of landscapes. In our approach the 3D tree models are transformedto a quasi-3D tree database registering geometrical and shading information of tree surfaces, i.e. their normalvectors, relative depth, and shadowing of direct sunlight and skylight, by using a combination of 2D buffers.Thus the rendering speed of quasi-3D trees depends on their display sizes only, regardless of the complexity oftheir original 3D tree models. By utilizing a two-step shadowing algorithm, our proposed method can create highquality forest scenes illuminated by both sunlight and skylight at a low cost. It can generate both umbrae andpenumbrae on a tree cast by other trees and any other objects such as buildings or clouds. Transparency, specularreflection and inter-reflection of leaves, which influence the delicate shading effects of trees, can also be simulatedwith verisimilitude.Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three dimensional Graphics and Realism