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Now showing 1 - 10 of 25
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    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.
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    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.
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    Peripheral Retinal Image Simulation Based on Retina Shapes
    (The Eurographics Association, 2016) Dias, Catarina; Wick, Michael; Rifai, Katharina; Wahl, Siegfried; T. Bashford-Rogers and L. P. Santos
    We present a method to render the image of a scene reaching the retina, the retinal image, taking into account human offaxis optical aberrations. To this end, we consider realistic wide-angle eye models that offer an anatomical description of the refractive structures of the eye as a set of lenses and accurately reproduce the optical aberrations in the periphery. We then combine these with representative retinal shapes and with distributed ray tracing. Due to the interplay between the eye model and the curved retina, we obtain a realistic simulation of the retinal image, not only foveally but also in the periphery.
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    Lowering the Entry Barrier for Students Programming Virtual Reality Applications
    (The Eurographics Association, 2016) Lambers, Martin; Beatriz Sousa Santos and Jean-Michel Dischler
    In Computer Graphics, it is common practice to accompany lectures with hands-on tutorials and/or project assignments that allow students to write and run their own interactive graphics applications. In the special case of Virtual Reality courses, this approach is difficult to maintain since the software requirements pose a high entry barrier to students. In this paper, we propose a technique to significantly simplify Virtual Reality application programming, and implement it in an easy-to-use framework that supports the full range of typical Virtual Reality hardware setups, from head-mounted displays to multi-node, multi-GPU render clusters. The framework lowers the entry barrier for students and allows them to focus on course goals instead of fighting software complexities.
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    Two-Level Adaptive Sampling for Illumination Integrals using Bayesian Monte Carlo
    (The Eurographics Association, 2016) Marques, Ricardo; Bouville, Christian; Santos, Luis P.; Bouatouch, Kadi; T. Bashford-Rogers and L. P. Santos
    Bayesian Monte Carlo (BMC) is a promising integration technique which considerably broadens the theoretical tools that can be used to maximize and exploit the information produced by sampling, while keeping the fundamental property of data dimension independence of classical Monte Carlo (CMC). Moreover, BMC uses information that is ignored in the CMC method, such as the position of the samples and prior stochastic information about the integrand, which often leads to better integral estimates. Nevertheless, the use of BMC in computer graphics is still in an incipient phase and its application to more evolved and widely used rendering algorithms remains cumbersome. In this article we propose to apply BMC to a two-level adaptive sampling scheme for illumination integrals. We propose an efficient solution for the second level quadrature computation and show that the proposed method outperforms adaptive quasi-Monte Carlo in terms of image error and high frequency noise.
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    Texel Shading
    (The Eurographics Association, 2016) Hillesland, Karl E.; Yang, J. C.; T. Bashford-Rogers and L. P. Santos
    We have developed a texture space shading system built on modern graphics hardware. It begins with a conventional rasterization stage, but records texel accesses as shading work rather than running a shade per pixel. Shading is performed by a separate compute stage, storing the results in a texture. As a baseline, the texels correspond to those required for mipmapped texturing. A final stage collects data from the texture. Storing results in a texture allows for reuse across frames. We also show how adapting shade rate to less than once per pixel further increases performance. We vary shading load to show when these techniques provide a performance win, with up to 4.1x speedup in our experiments at shading times less than 4 ms.
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    Near-Instant Capture of High-Resolution Facial Geometry and Reflectance
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Fyffe, Graham; Graham, Paul; Tunwattanapong, Borom; Ghosh, Abhijeet; Debevec, Paul; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
    We present a near-instant method for acquiring facial geometry and reflectance using a set of commodity DSLR cameras and flashes. Our setup consists of twenty-four cameras and six flashes which are fired in rapid succession with subsets of the cameras. Each camera records only a single photograph and the total capture time is less than the 67ms blink reflex. The cameras and flashes are specially arranged to produce an even distribution of specular highlights on the face. We employ this set of acquired images to estimate diffuse color, specular intensity, specular exponent, and surface orientation at each point on the face. We further refine the facial base geometry obtained from multi-view stereo using estimated diffuse and specular photometric information. This allows final submillimeter surface mesostructure detail to be obtained via shape-from-specularity. The final system uses commodity components and produces models suitable for authoring high-quality digital human characters.
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    3D Modelling Framework: an Incremental Approach
    (The Eurographics Association, 2016) Almeida, Luis; Menezes, Paulo; Dias, Jorge; Luis Gonzaga Magalhaes and Rafal Mantiuk
    This paper presents a framework for on-line incremental 3D modeling useful for human computer interaction or telepresence applications. We aim a free viewpoint approach based on user's realistic representation to simulate a real face-to-face meeting. Our contribution includes a new adaptation of the Crust algorithm for incremental reconstruction purposes and, a confidence method that evaluates the fusion of new data into the reconstructed model, based on measure uncertainty and novelty.With depth and image information of a single RGB-D sensor, we incrementally reconstruct a mesh model by combining visual features and shape-based alignment.
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    Character Contact Re-positioning Under Large Environment Deformation
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Tonneau, Steve; Al-Ashqar, Rami Ali; Pettré, Julien; Komura, Taku; Mansard, Nicolas; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
    Character animation based on motion capture provides intrinsically plausible results, but lacks the flexibility of procedural methods. Motion editing methods partially address this limitation by adapting the animation to small deformations of the environment.We extend one such method, the so-called relationship descriptors, to tackle the issue of motion editing under large environment deformations. Large deformations often result in joint limits violation, loss of balance, or collisions. Our method handles these situations by automatically detecting and re-positioning invalidated contacts. The new contact configurations are chosen to preserve the mechanical properties of the original contacts in order to provide plausible support phases. When it is not possible to find an equivalent contact, a procedural animation is generated and blended with the original motion. Thanks to an optimization scheme, the resulting motions are continuous and preserve the style of the reference motions. The method is fully interactive and enables the motion to be adapted on-line even in case of large changes of the environment. We demonstrate our method on several challenging scenarios, proving its immediate application to 3D animation softwares and video games.
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    Narrow Band FLIP for Liquid Simulations
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Ferstl, Florian; Ando, Ryoichi; Wojtan, Chris; Westermann, Rüdiger; Thuerey, Nils; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
    The Fluid Implicit Particle method (FLIP) for liquid simulations uses particles to reduce numerical dissipation and provide important visual cues for events like complex splashes and small-scale features near the liquid surface. Unfortunately, FLIP simulations can be computationally expensive, because they require a dense sampling of particles to fill the entire liquid volume. Furthermore, the vast majority of these FLIP particles contribute nothing to the fluid's visual appearance, especially for larger volumes of liquid. We present a method that only uses FLIP particles within a narrow band of the liquid surface, while efficiently representing the remaining inner volume on a regular grid. We show that a naïve realization of this idea introduces unstable and uncontrollable energy fluctuations, and we propose a novel coupling scheme between FLIP particles and regular grid which overcomes this problem. Our method drastically reduces the particle count and simulation times while yielding results that are nearly indistinguishable from regular FLIP simulations. Our approach is easy to integrate into any existing FLIP implementation.