7,949 research outputs found
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
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&
Ray casting implicit fractal surfaces with reduced affine arithmetic
A method is presented for ray casting implicit surfaces defined by fractal combinations of procedural noise functions. The method is robust and uses affine arithmetic to bound the variation of the implicit function along a ray. The method is also efficient due to a modification in the affine arithmetic representation that introduces a condensation step at the end of every non-affine operation. We show that our method is able to retain the tight estimation capabilities of affine arithmetic for ray casting implicit surfaces made from procedural noise functions while being faster to compute and more efficient to store
QuickCSG: Fast Arbitrary Boolean Combinations of N Solids
QuickCSG computes the result for general N-polyhedron boolean expressions
without an intermediate tree of solids. We propose a vertex-centric view of the
problem, which simplifies the identification of final geometric contributions,
and facilitates its spatial decomposition. The problem is then cast in a single
KD-tree exploration, geared toward the result by early pruning of any region of
space not contributing to the final surface. We assume strong regularity
properties on the input meshes and that they are in general position. This
simplifying assumption, in combination with our vertex-centric approach,
improves the speed of the approach. Complemented with a task-stealing
parallelization, the algorithm achieves breakthrough performance, one to two
orders of magnitude speedups with respect to state-of-the-art CPU algorithms,
on boolean operations over two to dozens of polyhedra. The algorithm also
outperforms GPU implementations with approximate discretizations, while
producing an output without redundant facets. Despite the restrictive
assumptions on the input, we show the usefulness of QuickCSG for applications
with large CSG problems and strong temporal constraints, e.g. modeling for 3D
printers, reconstruction from visual hulls and collision detection
Object partitioning considered harmful : space subdivision for BVHs
A major factor for the efficiency of ray tracing is the use of good acceleration structures. Recently, bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs) have become the preferred acceleration structures, due to their competitive performance and greater flexibility compared to KD trees. In this paper, we present a study on algorithms for the construction of optimal BVHs.
Due to the exponential nature of the problem, constructing optimal BVHs for ray tracing remains an open topic. By exploiting the linearity of the surface area heuristic (SAH), we develop an algorithm that can find optimal partitions in polynomial time. We further generalize this algorithm and show that every SAH-based KD tree or BVH construction algorithm is a special case of the generic algorithm.
Based on a number of experiments with the generic algorithm, we conclude that the assumption of non-terminating rays in the surface area cost model becomes a major obstacle for using the full potential of BVHs. We also observe that enforcing space subdivision helps to improve BVH performance. Finally, we develop a simple space partitioning algorithm for building efficient BVHs
Rendering Curved Triangles on the GPU
This Thesis presents a new approach to render triangular BĂ©zier
patches in real time. The goal is to achieve a very good visual quality,
avoid artifacts in the silhouette, and get in nite detail.
Our approach consists in a ray casting technique to render tri-
angular B ezier patches in real time. It is based on previous work
explained in this document to implement a fast ray-surface intersec-
tion technique. This previous work consists in adapting Newton's
method to implement the intersections achieving interactive framer-
ates ray casting di erent surfaces.
The main contributions of our approach are adapting New-
ton's method to perform intersections with triangular bicubic B ezier
patches and implementing it in GPU to optimize performance using
graphics hardware.
Finally, we also contribute adapting the normal mapping tech-
nique to shade the models and, thus, achieve even greater detail
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