9,607 research outputs found
The Iray Light Transport Simulation and Rendering System
While ray tracing has become increasingly common and path tracing is well
understood by now, a major challenge lies in crafting an easy-to-use and
efficient system implementing these technologies. Following a purely
physically-based paradigm while still allowing for artistic workflows, the Iray
light transport simulation and rendering system allows for rendering complex
scenes by the push of a button and thus makes accurate light transport
simulation widely available. In this document we discuss the challenges and
implementation choices that follow from our primary design decisions,
demonstrating that such a rendering system can be made a practical, scalable,
and efficient real-world application that has been adopted by various companies
across many fields and is in use by many industry professionals today
A survey of real-time crowd rendering
In this survey we review, classify and compare existing approaches for real-time crowd rendering. We first overview character animation techniques, as they are highly tied to crowd rendering performance, and then we analyze the state of the art in crowd rendering. We discuss different representations for level-of-detail (LoD) rendering of animated characters, including polygon-based, point-based, and image-based techniques, and review different criteria for runtime LoD selection. Besides LoD approaches, we review classic acceleration schemes, such as frustum culling and occlusion culling, and describe how they can be adapted to handle crowds of animated characters. We also discuss specific acceleration techniques for crowd rendering, such as primitive pseudo-instancing, palette skinning, and dynamic key-pose caching, which benefit from current graphics hardware. We also address other factors affecting performance and realism of crowds such as lighting, shadowing, clothing and variability. Finally we provide an exhaustive comparison of the most relevant approaches in the field.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
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Efficient Shadows from Sampled Environment Maps
This paper addresses the problem of efficiently calculating shadows from environment maps. Since accurate rendering of shadows from environment maps requires hundreds of lights, the expensive computation is determining visibility from each pixel to each light direction, such as by ray-tracing. We show that coherence in both spatial and angular domains can be used to reduce the number of shadow rays that need to be traced. Specifically, we use a coarse-to-fine evaluation of the image, predicting visibility by reusing visibility calculations from four nearby pixels that have already been evaluated. This simple method allows us to explicitly mark regions of uncertainty in the prediction. By only tracing rays in these and neighboring directions, we are able to reduce the number of shadow rays traced by up to a factor of 20 while maintaining error rates below 0.01%. For many scenes, our algorithm can add shadowing from hundreds of lights at twice the cost of rendering without shadows
Single-image RGB Photometric Stereo With Spatially-varying Albedo
We present a single-shot system to recover surface geometry of objects with
spatially-varying albedos, from images captured under a calibrated RGB
photometric stereo setup---with three light directions multiplexed across
different color channels in the observed RGB image. Since the problem is
ill-posed point-wise, we assume that the albedo map can be modeled as
piece-wise constant with a restricted number of distinct albedo values. We show
that under ideal conditions, the shape of a non-degenerate local constant
albedo surface patch can theoretically be recovered exactly. Moreover, we
present a practical and efficient algorithm that uses this model to robustly
recover shape from real images. Our method first reasons about shape locally in
a dense set of patches in the observed image, producing shape distributions for
every patch. These local distributions are then combined to produce a single
consistent surface normal map. We demonstrate the efficacy of the approach
through experiments on both synthetic renderings as well as real captured
images.Comment: 3DV 2016. Project page at http://www.ttic.edu/chakrabarti/rgbps
Joint Material and Illumination Estimation from Photo Sets in the Wild
Faithful manipulation of shape, material, and illumination in 2D Internet
images would greatly benefit from a reliable factorization of appearance into
material (i.e., diffuse and specular) and illumination (i.e., environment
maps). On the one hand, current methods that produce very high fidelity
results, typically require controlled settings, expensive devices, or
significant manual effort. To the other hand, methods that are automatic and
work on 'in the wild' Internet images, often extract only low-frequency
lighting or diffuse materials. In this work, we propose to make use of a set of
photographs in order to jointly estimate the non-diffuse materials and sharp
lighting in an uncontrolled setting. Our key observation is that seeing
multiple instances of the same material under different illumination (i.e.,
environment), and different materials under the same illumination provide
valuable constraints that can be exploited to yield a high-quality solution
(i.e., specular materials and environment illumination) for all the observed
materials and environments. Similar constraints also arise when observing
multiple materials in a single environment, or a single material across
multiple environments. The core of this approach is an optimization procedure
that uses two neural networks that are trained on synthetic images to predict
good gradients in parametric space given observation of reflected light. We
evaluate our method on a range of synthetic and real examples to generate
high-quality estimates, qualitatively compare our results against
state-of-the-art alternatives via a user study, and demonstrate
photo-consistent image manipulation that is otherwise very challenging to
achieve
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