25,862 research outputs found
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
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
Developing serious games for cultural heritage: a state-of-the-art review
Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result, the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented
Serious Games in Cultural Heritage
Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented
Design of a multimodal rendering system
This paper addresses the rendering of aligned regular multimodal
datasets. It presents a general framework of multimodal data fusion
that includes several data merging methods. We also analyze the
requirements of a rendering system able to provide these different
fusion methods. On the basis of these requirements, we propose a novel
design for a multimodal rendering system. The design has been
implemented and proved showing to be efficient and flexible.Postprint (published version
Path-tracing Monte Carlo Library for 3D Radiative Transfer in Highly Resolved Cloudy Atmospheres
Interactions between clouds and radiation are at the root of many
difficulties in numerically predicting future weather and climate and in
retrieving the state of the atmosphere from remote sensing observations. The
large range of issues related to these interactions, and in particular to
three-dimensional interactions, motivated the development of accurate radiative
tools able to compute all types of radiative metrics, from monochromatic, local
and directional observables, to integrated energetic quantities. In the
continuity of this community effort, we propose here an open-source library for
general use in Monte Carlo algorithms. This library is devoted to the
acceleration of path-tracing in complex data, typically high-resolution
large-domain grounds and clouds. The main algorithmic advances embedded in the
library are those related to the construction and traversal of hierarchical
grids accelerating the tracing of paths through heterogeneous fields in
null-collision (maximum cross-section) algorithms. We show that with these
hierarchical grids, the computing time is only weakly sensitivive to the
refinement of the volumetric data. The library is tested with a rendering
algorithm that produces synthetic images of cloud radiances. Two other examples
are given as illustrations, that are respectively used to analyse the
transmission of solar radiation under a cloud together with its sensitivity to
an optical parameter, and to assess a parametrization of 3D radiative effects
of clouds.Comment: Submitted to JAMES, revised and submitted again (this is v2
SurfelMeshing: Online Surfel-Based Mesh Reconstruction
We address the problem of mesh reconstruction from live RGB-D video, assuming
a calibrated camera and poses provided externally (e.g., by a SLAM system). In
contrast to most existing approaches, we do not fuse depth measurements in a
volume but in a dense surfel cloud. We asynchronously (re)triangulate the
smoothed surfels to reconstruct a surface mesh. This novel approach enables to
maintain a dense surface representation of the scene during SLAM which can
quickly adapt to loop closures. This is possible by deforming the surfel cloud
and asynchronously remeshing the surface where necessary. The surfel-based
representation also naturally supports strongly varying scan resolution. In
particular, it reconstructs colors at the input camera's resolution. Moreover,
in contrast to many volumetric approaches, ours can reconstruct thin objects
since objects do not need to enclose a volume. We demonstrate our approach in a
number of experiments, showing that it produces reconstructions that are
competitive with the state-of-the-art, and we discuss its advantages and
limitations. The algorithm (excluding loop closure functionality) is available
as open source at https://github.com/puzzlepaint/surfelmeshing .Comment: Version accepted to IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine
Intelligenc
Estimation of a 3D motion field from a multi-camera array using a multiresolution Gaussian mixture model
The problem of modelling geometry for video based rendering has been much studied in recent years, due to the growing interest in 'free viewpoint' video and similar applications. Common approaches fall into two categories: those which approximate surfaces from dense depth maps obtained by generalisations of stereopsis and those which employ an explicit geometric representation such as a mesh. While the former have generality with respect to geometry, they are limited in terms of viewpoint; the latter, on the other hand, sacrifice generality of geometry for freedom to pick an arbitary viewpoint. The purpose of the work reported here is to bridge this gap in object representation, by employing a stochastic model of object structure: a multiresolution Gaussian mixture. Estimation of the model and tracking it through time from multiple cameras is achieved by a multiresolution stochastic simulation. After a brief outline of the method, its use in modelling human motion using data from local and other sources is presented to illustrate its effectiveness compared to the current state of the art
Mobile graphics: SIGGRAPH Asia 2017 course
Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
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