Progressive refinement rendering of implicit surfaces

The visualisation of implicit surfaces can be an inefficient task when such surfaces are complex and highly detailed. Visualising a surface by first converting it to a polygon mesh may lead to an excessive polygon count. Visualising a surface by direct ray casting is often a slow procedure. In this paper we present a progressive refinement renderer for implicit surfaces that are Lipschitz continuous. The renderer first displays a low resolution estimate of what the final image is going to be and, as the computation progresses, increases the quality of this estimate at an interactive frame rate. This renderer provides a quick previewing facility that significantly reduces the design cycle of a new and complex implicit surface. The renderer is also capable of completing an image faster than a conventional implicit surface rendering algorithm based on ray casting

A Beam Tracing with Precise Antialiasing for Polyhedral Scenes

International audienceRay tracing is one of the most important rendering techniques used in computer graphics. A fundamental problem of classical ray tracers is the well-known aliasing. With small objects, or small shadows, aliasing becomes a crucial problem to solve. Beam tracers can be considered as an extension of classical ray tracers. They replace the concept of infinitesimal ray by that of beam but they are generally more complex than ray tracers. The new method presented in this paper is a high quality beam tracer that provides a robust and general antialiasing for polyhedral scenes. Compared to similar beam tracers, this method has some major advantages: - complex and expensive computations of conventional beam-object intersection are entirely avoided, so an extension to some non polyhedral scenes such as CSG ones is possible; - usual approximations or complex approaches for refraction computations are avoided. Moreover, this method is entirely compatible with the usual improvements of classical ray tracing (spatial subdivisions or hierarchical bounding volumes)

Fast Reliable Ray-tracing of Procedurally Defined Implicit Surfaces Using Revised Affine Arithmetic

Fast and reliable rendering of implicit surfaces is an important area in the field of implicit modelling. Direct rendering, namely ray-tracing, is shown to be a suitable technique for obtaining good-quality visualisations of implicit surfaces. We present a technique for reliable ray-tracing of arbitrary procedurally defined implicit surfaces by using a modification of Affine Arithmetic called Revised Affine Arithmetic. A wide range of procedurally defined implicit objects can be rendered using this technique including polynomial surfaces, constructive solids, pseudo-random objects, procedurally defined microstructures, and others. We compare our technique with other reliable techniques based on Interval and Affine Arithmetic to show that our technique provides the fastest, while still reliable, ray-surface intersections and ray-tracing. We also suggest possible modifications for the GPU implementation of this technique for real-time rendering of relatively simple implicit models and for near real-time for complex implicit models

ADAM: a general method for using various data types in asteroid reconstruction

We introduce ADAM, the All-Data Asteroid Modelling algorithm. ADAM is simple and universal since it handles all disk-resolved data types (adaptive optics or other images, interferometry, and range-Doppler radar data) in a uniform manner via the 2D Fourier transform, enabling fast convergence in model optimization. The resolved data can be combined with disk-integrated data (photometry). In the reconstruction process, the difference between each data type is only a few code lines defining the particular generalized projection from 3D onto a 2D image plane. Occultation timings can be included as sparse silhouettes, and thermal infrared data are efficiently handled with an approximate algorithm that is sufficient in practice due to the dominance of the high-contrast (boundary) pixels over the low-contrast (interior) ones. This is of particular importance to the raw ALMA data that can be directly handled by ADAM without having to construct the standard image. We study the reliability of the inversion by using the independent shape supports of function series and control-point surfaces. When other data are lacking, one can carry out fast nonconvex lightcurve-only inversion, but any shape models resulting from it should only be taken as illustrative global-scale ones.Comment: 11 pages, submitted to A&

Feature Adaptive Ray Tracing of Subdivision Surfaces

abstract: Subdivision surfaces have gained more and more traction since it became the standard surface representation in the movie industry for many years. And Catmull-Clark subdivision scheme is the most popular one for handling polygonal meshes. After its introduction, Catmull-Clark surfaces have been extended to several eminent ways, including the handling of boundaries, infinitely sharp creases, semi-sharp creases, and hierarchically defined detail. For ray tracing of subdivision surfaces, a common way is to construct spatial bounding volume hierarchies on top of input control mesh. However, a high-level refined subdivision surface not only requires a substantial amount of memory storage, but also causes slow and inefficient ray tracing. In this thesis, it presents a new way to improve the efficiency of ray tracing of subdivision surfaces, while the quality is not as good as general methods.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Computer Science 201

Visibility computation through image generalization

This dissertation introduces the image generalization paradigm for computing visibility. The paradigm is based on the observation that an image is a powerful tool for computing visibility. An image can be rendered efficiently with the support of graphics hardware and each of the millions of pixels in the image reports a visible geometric primitive. However, the visibility solution computed by a conventional image is far from complete. A conventional image has a uniform sampling rate which can miss visible geometric primitives with a small screen footprint. A conventional image can only find geometric primitives to which there is direct line of sight from the center of projection (i.e. the eye) of the image; therefore, a conventional image cannot compute the set of geometric primitives that become visible as the viewpoint translates, or as time changes in a dynamic dataset. Finally, like any sample-based representation, a conventional image can only confirm that a geometric primitive is visible, but it cannot confirm that a geometric primitive is hidden, as that would require an infinite number of samples to confirm that the primitive is hidden at all of its points. ^ The image generalization paradigm overcomes the visibility computation limitations of conventional images. The paradigm has three elements. (1) Sampling pattern generalization entails adding sampling locations to the image plane where needed to find visible geometric primitives with a small footprint. (2) Visibility sample generalization entails replacing the conventional scalar visibility sample with a higher dimensional sample that records all geometric primitives visible at a sampling location as the viewpoint translates or as time changes in a dynamic dataset; the higher-dimensional visibility sample is computed exactly, by solving visibility event equations, and not through sampling. Another form of visibility sample generalization is to enhance a sample with its trajectory as the geometric primitive it samples moves in a dynamic dataset. (3) Ray geometry generalization redefines a camera ray as the set of 3D points that project at a given image location; this generalization supports rays that are not straight lines, and enables designing cameras with non-linear rays that circumvent occluders to gather samples not visible from a reference viewpoint. ^ The image generalization paradigm has been used to develop visibility algorithms for a variety of datasets, of visibility parameter domains, and of performance-accuracy tradeoff requirements. These include an aggressive from-point visibility algorithm that guarantees finding all geometric primitives with a visible fragment, no matter how small primitive\u27s image footprint, an efficient and robust exact from-point visibility algorithm that iterates between a sample-based and a continuous visibility analysis of the image plane to quickly converge to the exact solution, a from-rectangle visibility algorithm that uses 2D visibility samples to compute a visible set that is exact under viewpoint translation, a flexible pinhole camera that enables local modulations of the sampling rate over the image plane according to an input importance map, an animated depth image that not only stores color and depth per pixel but also a compact representation of pixel sample trajectories, and a curved ray camera that integrates seamlessly multiple viewpoints into a multiperspective image without the viewpoint transition distortion artifacts of prior art methods

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationWhile boundary representations, such as nonuniform rational B-spline (NURBS) surfaces, have traditionally well served the needs of the modeling community, they have not seen widespread adoption among the wider engineering discipline. There is a common perception that NURBS are slow to evaluate and complex to implement. Whereas computer-aided design commonly deals with surfaces, the engineering community must deal with materials that have thickness. Traditional visualization techniques have avoided NURBS, and there has been little cross-talk between the rich spline approximation community and the larger engineering field. Recently there has been a strong desire to marry the modeling and analysis phases of the iterative design cycle, be it in car design, turbulent flow simulation around an airfoil, or lighting design. Research has demonstrated that employing a single representation throughout the cycle has key advantages. Furthermore, novel manufacturing techniques employing heterogeneous materials require the introduction of volumetric modeling representations. There is little question that fields such as scientific visualization and mechanical engineering could benefit from the powerful approximation properties of splines. In this dissertation, we remove several hurdles to the application of NURBS to problems in engineering and demonstrate how their unique properties can be leveraged to solve problems of interest

Evaluation of subdivision methods used in octree ray tracing algorithms

The non-uniform spatial subdivision technique refined by Andrew Glassner [Glassner 1984] minimizes facet intersection tests (i) by automatically generating a density dependent spatial hierarchy of facet regions (called an octree) and (ii) by only testing facets in regions along the path of the ray. Past research has addressed optimization of the octree ray tracing process by separately improving both the octree traversal method and facet intersection algorithms. This author attempted to further improve the overall approach by attempting to identify new octree construction methods that would decrease the number of traversals required to render the scene. This research focused on the subdivision technique used in constructing the octree. The conventional Glassner algorithm utilizes cubic octants that can result in a large population of empty octants when rendering scenes containing localized regions with high facet density. Sparse octrees (containing significant numbers of empty octants) were believed to hinder performance of the facet traversal algorithm. As an alternative to the conventional cubic algorithm, the performance benefits of non-cubic octants were investigated. Octrees constructed with rectangular octants which more closely bound the scene were tested as one alternative to the cubic octants method. As a second alternative, this author proposed and implemented an ideal-cut subdivision algorithm that subdivides the parent octant through the mean location of the facets contained in the octant. For the scenes tested, the conventional cubic algorithm was shown to perform better than either alternative method, although, it was also shown to suffer from memory and run-time explosions on some scenes. The rectangular octant algorithm consistently approached the run-times produced by the cubic method. Since, the rectangular method defaults to the cubic method for scenes with 1:1:1 aspect ratios, the rectangular method must be considered as a reasonable alternative in rendering applications. The idealcu