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

Drishti, a volume exploration and presentation tool

Among several rendering techniques for volumetric data, direct volume rendering is a powerful visualization tool for a wide variety of applications. This paper describes the major features of hardware based volume exploration and presentation tool - Drishti. The word, Drishti, stands for vision or insight in Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language. Drishti is a cross-platform open-source volume rendering system that delivers high quality, state of the art renderings. The features in Drishti include, though not limited to, production quality rendering, volume sculpting, multi-resolution zooming, transfer function blending, profile generation, measurement tools, mesh generation, stereo/anaglyph/crosseye renderings. Ultimately, Drishti provides an intuitive and powerful interface for choreographing animations

Pipeline Rendering: Interactive Refractions, Reflections and Shadows

A coordinated use of hardware-provided bitplanes and rendering pipelines can create ray-trace quality illumination effects in real time. We provide recursive reflections through the use of secondary viewpoints, and present a method for using a homogeneous 2D projective image mapping to extend this method for refractive surfaces. We extend the traditional use of shadow volumes to provide reflected and refracted shadows as well as reflected and refracted lighting. A shadow blending technique is demonstrated, and the shadow and lighting effects are incorporated into our recursive viewpoint paradigm. Finally, we incorporate material properties including a translucency model to provide a general framework for creating physically approximate renderings. These techniques are immediately applicable to areas such as 3D modelling, animation and interactive environments to produce more realistic images in real time

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

Learning to Predict Image-based Rendering Artifacts with Respect to a Hidden Reference Image

Image metrics predict the perceived per-pixel difference between a reference image and its degraded (e. g., re-rendered) version. In several important applications, the reference image is not available and image metrics cannot be applied. We devise a neural network architecture and training procedure that allows predicting the MSE, SSIM or VGG16 image difference from the distorted image alone while the reference is not observed. This is enabled by two insights: The first is to inject sufficiently many un-distorted natural image patches, which can be found in arbitrary amounts and are known to have no perceivable difference to themselves. This avoids false positives. The second is to balance the learning, where it is carefully made sure that all image errors are equally likely, avoiding false negatives. Surprisingly, we observe, that the resulting no-reference metric, subjectively, can even perform better than the reference-based one, as it had to become robust against mis-alignments. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach in an image-based rendering context, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Finally, we demonstrate two applications which reduce light field capture time and provide guidance for interactive depth adjustment.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figure

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

A multi-camera approach to image-based rendering and 3-D/Multiview display of ancient chinese artifacts

published_or_final_versio

Image-based rendering of ancient Chinese artifacts for multi-view displays - a multi-camera approach

Image-based rendering (IBR) is an emerging and promising technology for photo-realistic rendering of scenes and objects from a collection of densely sampled images and videos. This paper proposes an image-based approach to the rendering and multi-view display of ancient Chinese artifacts for cultural heritage preservation. A multiple-camera circular array was constructed to record images of the artifacts. Novel techniques for segmenting and rendering new views of the artifacts from the sampled images are developed. The multiple views so synthesized enable the ancient artifacts to be displayed in modern multi-view displays and conventional stereo systems. Several collections from the University Museum and Art Gallery at the University of Hong Kong are captured and excellent rendering results are obtained. ©2010 IEEE.published_or_final_versionThe 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), Paris, France, 30 May-2 June 2010. In IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems Proceedings, 2010, p. 3252-325