Simulation of a solar funnel cooker using MATLAB

A software for the calculation of the radiation heat transfer in solar funnel cookers by means of the radiosity method has been developed in Matlab. The software has been used to study a folding solar cooker. The cooker geometry is discretized using a triangular mesh where a piecewise constant approximation is assumed for the radiosity function. Form factors, including self-occlusions, are calculated by properly refining the triangular mesh. The concentration factor of the solar cooker is estimated as a function of its position and orientation with respect to that of the Sun.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Hardware Acceleration of Progressive Refinement Radiosity using Nvidia RTX

A vital component of photo-realistic image synthesis is the simulation of indirect diffuse reflections, which still remain a quintessential hurdle that modern rendering engines struggle to overcome. Real-time applications typically pre-generate diffuse lighting information offline using radiosity to avoid performing costly computations at run-time. In this thesis we present a variant of progressive refinement radiosity that utilizes Nvidia's novel RTX technology to accelerate the process of form-factor computation without compromising on visual fidelity. Through a modern implementation built on DirectX 12 we demonstrate that offloading radiosity's visibility component to RT cores significantly improves the lightmap generation process and potentially propels it into the domain of real-time.Comment: 114 page

Radioptimization - Goal based rendering

Journal ArticleThis paper presents a method for designing the illumination in an environment using optimization techniques applied to a radiosity based image synthesis system. An optimization of lighting parameters is performed based on user specified constraints and objectives for the illumination of t h e environment. The system solves for t h e "best" possible settings for: light source emissivities, element reflectivities, and spot light directionality parameters so that the design goals, such as to minimize energy or to give the the room an impression of privacy, are met. The system absorbs much of the burden for searching the design space allowing the user to focus on the goals of the illumination design rather than the intricate details of a complete lighting specification. A software implementation is described and some results of using the system are reported. The system employs an object space perceptual model based on work by Tumblin and Rushmeier to account for psychophysical effects such as subjective brightness and the visual adaptation level of a viewer. This provides a higher fidelity when comparing the illumination in a computer simulated environment against what would be viewed in the "real" world. Optimization criteria are based on subjective impressions of illumination with qualities such as "pleasantness", and "privateness". The qualities were selected based on Flynn's work in illuminating engineering. These criteria were applied to the radiosity context through an experiment conducted with subjects viewing rendered images, and the respondents evaluated with a Multi-Dimensional Scaling analysis

A Monte Carlo method for accelerating the computation of animated radiosity sequences

Realistic rendering animation is known to be an expensive processing task when physically-based global illumination methods are used in order to improve illumination details. This paper presents an acceleration technique to compute animations in radiosity environments. The technique is based on an interpolated approach that exploits temporal coherence in radiosity. A fast global Monte Carlo pre-processing step is introduced to the whole computation of the animated sequence to select important frames. These are fully computed and used as a base for the interpolation of all the sequence. The approach is completely view-independent. Once the illumination is computed, it can be visualized by any animated camera. Results present significant high speed-ups showing that the technique could be an interesting alternative to deterministic methods for computing non-interactive radiosity animations for moderately complex scenario

Spatial Sound Rendering – A Survey

Simulating propagation of sound and audio rendering can improve the sense of realism and the immersion both in complex acoustic environments and dynamic virtual scenes. In studies of sound auralization, the focus has always been on room acoustics modeling, but most of the same methods are also applicable in the construction of virtual environments such as those developed to facilitate computer gaming, cognitive research, and simulated training scenarios. This paper is a review of state-of-the-art techniques that are based on acoustic principles that apply not only to real rooms but also in 3D virtual environments. The paper also highlights the need to expand the field of immersive sound in a web based browsing environment, because, despite the interest and many benefits, few developments seem to have taken place within this context. Moreover, the paper includes a list of the most effective algorithms used for modelling spatial sound propagation and reports their advantages and disadvantages. Finally, the paper emphasizes in the evaluation of these proposed works

GPU-Based Global Illumination Using Lightcuts

Global Illumination aims to generate high quality images. But due to its highrequirements, it is usually quite slow. Research documented in this thesis wasintended to offer a hardware and software combined acceleration solution toglobal illumination. The GPU (using CUDA) was the hardware part of the wholemethod that applied parallelism to increase performance; the “Lightcuts”algorithm proposed by Walter (2005) at SIGGRAPH 2005 acted as the softwaremethod. As the results demonstrated in this thesis, this combined method offersa satisfactory performance boost effect for relatively complex scenes