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Now showing 1 - 10 of 14
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    On-Site Example-Based Material Appearance Acquisition
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Lin, Yiming; Peers, Pieter; Ghosh, Abhijeet; Boubekeur, Tamy and Sen, Pradeep
    We present a novel example-based material appearance modeling method suitable for rapid digital content creation. Our method only requires a single HDR photograph of a homogeneous isotropic dielectric exemplar object under known natural illumination. While conventional methods for appearance modeling require prior knowledge on the object shape, our method does not, nor does it recover the shape explicitly, greatly simplifying on-site appearance acquisition to a lightweight photography process suited for non-expert users. As our central contribution, we propose a shape-agnostic BRDF estimation procedure based on binary RGB profile matching.We also model the appearance of materials exhibiting a regular or stationary texture-like appearance, by synthesizing appropriate mesostructure from the same input HDR photograph and a mesostructure exemplar with (roughly) similar features. We believe our lightweight method for on-site shape-agnostic appearance acquisition presents a suitable alternative for a variety of applications that require plausible ''rapid-appearance-modeling''.
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    Global Illumination Shadow Layers
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) DESRICHARD, François; Vanderhaeghe, David; PAULIN, Mathias; Boubekeur, Tamy and Sen, Pradeep
    Computer graphics artists often resort to compositing to rework light effects in a synthetic image without requiring a new render. Shadows are primary subjects of artistic manipulation as they carry important stylistic information while our perception is tolerant with their editing. In this paper we formalize the notion of global shadow, generalizing direct shadow found in previous work to a global illumination context. We define an object's shadow layer as the difference between two altered renders of the scene. A shadow layer contains the radiance lost on the camera film because of a given object. We translate this definition in the theoretical framework of Monte-Carlo integration, obtaining a concise expression of the shadow layer. Building on it, we propose a path tracing algorithm that renders both the original image and any number of shadow layers in a single pass: the user may choose to separate shadows on a per-object and per-light basis, enabling intuitive and decoupled edits.
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    Flexible SVBRDF Capture with a Multi-Image Deep Network
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Deschaintre, Valentin; Aittala, Miika; Durand, Fredo; Drettakis, George; Bousseau, Adrien; Boubekeur, Tamy and Sen, Pradeep
    Empowered by deep learning, recent methods for material capture can estimate a spatially-varying reflectance from a single photograph. Such lightweight capture is in stark contrast with the tens or hundreds of pictures required by traditional optimization-based approaches. However, a single image is often simply not enough to observe the rich appearance of realworld materials. We present a deep-learning method capable of estimating material appearance from a variable number of uncalibrated and unordered pictures captured with a handheld camera and flash. Thanks to an order-independent fusing layer, this architecture extracts the most useful information from each picture, while benefiting from strong priors learned from data. The method can handle both view and light direction variation without calibration. We show how our method improves its prediction with the number of input pictures, and reaches high quality reconstructions with as little as 1 to 10 images - a sweet spot between existing single-image and complex multi-image approaches.
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    Learned Fitting of Spatially Varying BRDFs
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Merzbach, Sebastian; Hermann, Max; Rump, Martin; Klein, Reinhard; Boubekeur, Tamy and Sen, Pradeep
    The use of spatially varying reflectance models (SVBRDF) is the state of the art in physically based rendering and the ultimate goal is to acquire them from real world samples. Recently several promising deep learning approaches have emerged that create such models from a few uncalibrated photos, after being trained on synthetic SVBRDF datasets. While the achieved results are already very impressive, the reconstruction accuracy that is achieved by these approaches is still far from that of specialized devices. On the other hand, fitting SVBRDF parameter maps to the gibabytes of calibrated HDR images per material acquired by state of the art high quality material scanners takes on the order of several hours for realistic spatial resolutions. In this paper, we present a first deep learning approach that is capable of producing SVBRDF parameter maps more than two orders of magnitude faster than state of the art approaches, while still providing results of equal quality and generalizing to new materials unseen during the training. This is made possible by training our network on a large-scale database of material scans that we have gathered with a commercially available SVBRDF scanner. In particular, we train a convolutional neural network to map calibrated input images to the 13 parameter maps of an anisotropic Ward BRDF, modified to account for Fresnel reflections, and evaluate the results by comparing the measured images against re-renderings from our SVBRDF predictions. The novel approach is extensively validated on real world data taken from our material database, which we make publicly available under https://cg.cs.uni-bonn.de/svbrdfs/.
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    Orthogonal Array Sampling for Monte Carlo Rendering
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Jarosz, Wojciech; Enayet, Afnan; Kensler, Andrew; Kilpatrick, Charlie; Christensen, Per; Boubekeur, Tamy and Sen, Pradeep
    We generalize N-rooks, jittered, and (correlated) multi-jittered sampling to higher dimensions by importing and improving upon a class of techniques called orthogonal arrays from the statistics literature. Renderers typically combine or ''pad'' a collection of lower-dimensional (e.g. 2D and 1D) stratified patterns to form higher-dimensional samples for integration. This maintains stratification in the original dimension pairs, but looses it for all other dimension pairs. For truly multi-dimensional integrands like those in rendering, this increases variance and deteriorates its rate of convergence to that of pure random sampling. Care must therefore be taken to assign the primary dimension pairs to the dimensions with most integrand variation, but this complicates implementations. We tackle this problem by developing a collection of practical, in-place multi-dimensional sample generation routines that stratify points on all t-dimensional and 1-dimensional projections simultaneously. For instance, when t=2, any 2D projection of our samples is a (correlated) multi-jittered point set. This property not only reduces variance, but also simplifies implementations since sample dimensions can now be assigned to integrand dimensions arbitrarily while maintaining the same level of stratification. Our techniques reduce variance compared to traditional 2D padding approaches like PBRT's (0,2) and Stratified samplers, and provide quality nearly equal to state-of-the-art QMC samplers like Sobol and Halton while avoiding their structured artifacts as commonly seen when using a single sample set to cover an entire image. While in this work we focus on constructing finite sampling point sets, we also discuss potential avenues for extending our work to progressive sequences (more suitable for incremental rendering) in the future.
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    Real-time Image-based Lighting of Microfacet BRDFs with Varying Iridescence
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Kneiphof, Tom; Golla, Tim; Klein, Reinhard; Boubekeur, Tamy and Sen, Pradeep
    Iridescence is a natural phenomenon that is perceived as gradual color changes, depending on the view and illumination direction. Prominent examples are the colors seen in oil films and soap bubbles. Unfortunately, iridescent effects are particularly difficult to recreate in real-time computer graphics. We present a high-quality real-time method for rendering iridescent effects under image-based lighting. Previous methods model dielectric thin-films of varying thickness on top of an arbitrary micro-facet model with a conducting or dielectric base material, and evaluate the resulting reflectance term, responsible for the iridescent effects, only for a single direction when using real-time image-based lighting. This leads to bright halos at grazing angles and over-saturated colors on rough surfaces, which causes an unnatural appearance that is not observed in ground truth data. We address this problem by taking the distribution of light directions, given by the environment map and surface roughness, into account when evaluating the reflectance term. In particular, our approach prefilters the first and second moments of the light direction, which are used to evaluate a filtered version of the reflectance term. We show that the visual quality of our approach is superior to the ones previously achieved, while having only a small negative impact on performance.
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    Tessellated Shading Streaming
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Hladky, Jozef; Seidel, Hans-Peter; Steinberger, Markus; Boubekeur, Tamy and Sen, Pradeep
    Presenting high-fidelity 3D content on compact portable devices with low computational power is challenging. Smartphones, tablets and head-mounted displays (HMDs) suffer from thermal and battery-life constraints and thus cannot match the render quality of desktop PCs and laptops. Streaming rendering enables to show high-quality content but can suffer from potentially high latency. We propose an approach to efficiently capture shading samples in object space and packing them into a texture. Streaming this texture to the client, we support temporal frame up-sampling with high fidelity, low latency and high mobility. We introduce two novel sample distribution strategies and a novel triangle representation in the shading atlas space. Since such a system requires dynamic parallelism, we propose an implementation exploiting the power of hardware-accelerated tessellation stages. Our approach allows fast de-coding and rendering of extrapolated views on a client device by using hardwareaccelerated interpolation between shading samples and a set of potentially visible geometry. A comparison to existing shading methods shows that our sample distributions allow better client shading quality than previous atlas streaming approaches and outperforms image-based methods in all relevant aspects.
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    Adaptive BRDF-Oriented Multiple Importance Sampling of Many Lights
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Liu, Yifan; Xu, Kun; Yan, Ling-Qi; Boubekeur, Tamy and Sen, Pradeep
    Many-light rendering is becoming more common and important as rendering goes into the next level of complexity. However, to calculate the illumination under many lights, state of the art algorithms are still far from efficient, due to the separate consideration of light sampling and BRDF sampling. To deal with the inefficiency of many-light rendering, we present a novel light sampling method named BRDF-oriented light sampling, which selects lights based on importance values estimated using the BRDF's contributions. Our BRDF-oriented light sampling method works naturally with MIS, and allows us to dynamically determine the number of samples allocated for different sampling techniques. With our method, we can achieve a significantly faster convergence to the ground truth results, both perceptually and numerically, as compared to previous many-light rendering algorithms.
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    Distributing Monte Carlo Errors as a Blue Noise in Screen Space by Permuting Pixel Seeds Between Frames
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Heitz, Eric; Belcour, Laurent; Boubekeur, Tamy and Sen, Pradeep
    Recent work has shown that distributing Monte Carlo errors as a blue noise in screen space improves the perceptual quality of rendered images. However, obtaining such distributions remains an open problem with high sample counts and highdimensional rendering integrals. In this paper, we introduce a temporal algorithm that aims at overcoming these limitations. Our algorithm is applicable whenever multiple frames are rendered, typically for animated sequences or interactive applications. Our algorithm locally permutes the pixel sequences (represented by their seeds) to improve the error distribution across frames. Our approach works regardless of the sample count or the dimensionality and significantly improves the images in low-varying screen-space regions under coherent motion. Furthermore, it adds negligible overhead compared to the rendering times.
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    Quantifying the Error of Light Transport Algorithms
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Celarek, Adam; Jakob, Wenzel; Wimmer, Michael; Lehtinen, Jaakko; Boubekeur, Tamy and Sen, Pradeep
    This paper proposes a new methodology for measuring the error of unbiased physically based rendering algorithms. The current state of the art includes mean squared error (MSE) based metrics and visual comparisons of equal-time renderings of competing algorithms. Neither is satisfying as MSE does not describe behavior and can exhibit significant variance, and visual comparisons are inherently subjective. Our contribution is two-fold: First, we propose to compute many short renderings instead of a single long run and use the short renderings to estimate MSE expectation and variance as well as per-pixel standard deviation. An algorithm that achieves good results in most runs, but with occasional outliers is essentially unreliable, which we wish to quantify numerically. We use per-pixel standard deviation to identify problematic lighting effects of rendering algorithms. The second contribution is the error spectrum ensemble (ESE), a tool for measuring the distribution of error over frequencies. The ESE serves two purposes: It reveals correlation between pixels and can be used to detect outliers, which offset the amount of error substantially.