Physically-based rendering of human skin

This thesis explores a set of screen space physically-based subsurface scattering algorithms in order to improve the rendering of scanned human faces. Moreover, it presents extensions and introduces some PBR strategies to produce high quality renders. Finally, the implemented methods are evaluated

Pushing the Limits of 3D Color Printing: Error Diffusion with Translucent Materials

Accurate color reproduction is important in many applications of 3D printing, from design prototypes to 3D color copies or portraits. Although full color is available via other technologies, multi-jet printers have greater potential for graphical 3D printing, in terms of reproducing complex appearance properties. However, to date these printers cannot produce full color, and doing so poses substantial technical challenges, from the shear amount of data to the translucency of the available color materials. In this paper, we propose an error diffusion halftoning approach to achieve full color with multi-jet printers, which operates on multiple isosurfaces or layers within the object. We propose a novel traversal algorithm for voxel surfaces, which allows the transfer of existing error diffusion algorithms from 2D printing. The resulting prints faithfully reproduce colors, color gradients and fine-scale details.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figures; includes supplemental figure

Asymptotic wave-splitting in anisotropic linear acoustics

Linear acoustic wave-splitting is an often used tool in describing sound-wave propagation through earth's subsurface. Earth's subsurface is in general anisotropic due to the presence of water-filled porous rocks. Due to the complexity and the implicitness of the wave-splitting solutions in anisotropic media, wave-splitting in seismic experiments is often modeled as isotropic. With the present paper, we have derived a simple wave-splitting procedure for an instantaneously reacting anisotropic media that includes spatial variation in depth, yielding both a traditional (approximate) and a `true amplitude' wave-field decomposition. One of the main advantages of the method presented here is that it gives an explicit asymptotic representation of the linear acoustic-admittance operator to all orders of smoothness for the smooth, positive definite anisotropic material parameters considered here. Once the admittance operator is known we obtain an explicit asymptotic wave-splitting solution.Comment: 20 page

Ultrafast imaging of photoelectron packets generated from graphite surface

We present an electron projection imaging method to study the ultrafast evolution of photoelectron density distribution and transient fields near the surface. The dynamical profile of the photoelectrons from graphite reveals an origin of a thermionic emission, followed by an adiabatic process leading to electron acceleration and cooling before a freely expanding cloud is established. The hot electron emission is found to couple with a surface charge dipole layer formation, with a sheet density several orders of magnitude higher than that of the vacuum emitted cloud.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures. Applied Physics Letter, in pres

Separable Subsurface Scattering

In this paper, we propose two real-time models for simulating subsurface scattering for a large variety of translucent materials, which need under 0.5 ms per frame to execute. This makes them a practical option for real-time production scenarios. Current state-of-the-art, real-time approaches simulate subsurface light transport by approximating the radially symmetric non-separable diffusion kernel with a sum of separable Gaussians, which requires multiple (up to 12) 1D convolutions. In this work we relax the requirement of radial symmetry to approximate a 2D diffuse reflectance profile by a single separable kernel. We first show that low-rank approximations based on matrix factorization outperform previous approaches, but they still need several passes to get good results. To solve this, we present two different separable models: the first one yields a high-quality diffusion simulation, while the second one offers an attractive trade-off between physical accuracy and artistic control. Both allow rendering of subsurface scattering using only two 1D convolutions, reducing both execution time and memory consumption, while delivering results comparable to techniques with higher cost. Using our importance-sampling and jittering strategies, only seven samples per pixel are required. Our methods can be implemented as simple post-processing steps without intrusive changes to existing rendering pipelines

Procedural Spanish Moss Renderman Shader

This thesis discusses the creation of computer generated photorealistic Spanish moss, a plant that grows in trees in the American Southeast. In order to replicate the plant, a Renderman procedural shader was used that included hair-like qualities in order to replicate the surface properties of Spanish moss. The necessary attributes, how they are used in the code, and final results of the shader applied to a moss model are included in this paper

A Frequency Analysis and Dual Hierarchy for Efficient Rendering of Subsurface Scattering

International audienceBSSRDFs are commonly used to model subsurface light transport in highly scattering media such as skin and marble. Rendering with BSSRDFs requires an additional spatial integration, which can be significantly more expensive than surface-only rendering with BRDFs. We introduce a novel hierarchical rendering method that can mitigate this additional spatial integration cost. Our method has two key components: a novel frequency analysis of subsurface light transport, and a dual hierarchy over shading and illumination samples. Our frequency analysis predicts the spatial and angular variation of outgoing radiance due to a BSSRDF. We use this analysis to drive adaptive spatial BSSRDF integration with sparse image and illumination samples. We propose the use of a dual-tree structure that allows us to simultaneously traverse a tree of shade points (i.e., pixels) and a tree of object-space illumination samples. Our dual-tree approach generalizes existing single-tree accelerations. Both our frequency analysis and the dual-tree structure are compatible with most existing BSSRDF models, and we show that our method improves rendering times compared to the state of the art method of Jensen and Buhler

Wave-Equation Reflection Tomography: Annihilators and Sensitivity Kernals

In seismic tomography, the finite frequency content of broad-band data leads to interference effects in the process of medium reconstruction, which are ignored in traditional ray theoretical implementations. Various ways of looking at these effects in the framework of transmission tomography can be found in the literature. Here,we consider inverse scattering of bodywaves to develop a method of wave-equation reflection tomography with broad-band waveform data— which in exploration seismics is identified as a method of wave-equation migration velocity analysis. In the transition from transmission to reflection tomography the usual cross correlation between modelled and observed waveforms of a particular phase arrival is replaced by the action of operators (annihilators) to the observed broad-bandwave fields. Using the generalized screen expansion for one-way wave propagation, we develop the Fréchet (or sensitivity) kernel, and show how it can be evaluated with an adjoint state method. We cast the reflection tomography into an optimization procedure; the kernel appears in the gradient of this procedure.We include a numerical example of evaluating the kernel in a modified Marmousi model, which illustrates the complex dependency of the kernel on frequency band and, hence, scale. In heterogeneous media the kernels reflect proper wave dynamics and do not reveal a self-similar dependence on frequency: low-frequency wave components sample preferentially the smoother parts of the model, whereas the high-frequency data are—as expected—more sensitive to the stronger heterogeneity.We develop the concept for acoustic waves but there are no inherent limitations for the extension to the fully elastic case.TOTAL (Firm)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (grant EAR-0409816

Redefining A in RGBA: Towards a Standard for Graphical 3D Printing

Advances in multimaterial 3D printing have the potential to reproduce various visual appearance attributes of an object in addition to its shape. Since many existing 3D file formats encode color and translucency by RGBA textures mapped to 3D shapes, RGBA information is particularly important for practical applications. In contrast to color (encoded by RGB), which is specified by the object's reflectance, selected viewing conditions and a standard observer, translucency (encoded by A) is neither linked to any measurable physical nor perceptual quantity. Thus, reproducing translucency encoded by A is open for interpretation. In this paper, we propose a rigorous definition for A suitable for use in graphical 3D printing, which is independent of the 3D printing hardware and software, and which links both optical material properties and perceptual uniformity for human observers. By deriving our definition from the absorption and scattering coefficients of virtual homogeneous reference materials with an isotropic phase function, we achieve two important properties. First, a simple adjustment of A is possible, which preserves the translucency appearance if an object is re-scaled for printing. Second, determining the value of A for a real (potentially non-homogeneous) material, can be achieved by minimizing a distance function between light transport measurements of this material and simulated measurements of the reference materials. Such measurements can be conducted by commercial spectrophotometers used in graphic arts. Finally, we conduct visual experiments employing the method of constant stimuli, and derive from them an embedding of A into a nearly perceptually uniform scale of translucency for the reference materials.Comment: 20 pages (incl. appendices), 20 figures. Version with higher quality images: https://cloud-ext.igd.fraunhofer.de/s/pAMH67XjstaNcrF (main article) and https://cloud-ext.igd.fraunhofer.de/s/4rR5bH3FMfNsS5q (appendix). Supplemental material including code: https://cloud-ext.igd.fraunhofer.de/s/9BrZaj5Uh5d0cOU/downloa