Mélange de surfaces en temps réel : visualisation, contrôle des déformations et application à la modélisation

Les surfaces implicites ont été perçues au cours des années 80, comme une alternative intéressante aux modélisations paramétriques des surfaces (NURBS, etc). Elles sont définies comme l'ensemble des points de même valeur d'un champ potentiel, c'est-à-dire la frontière de deux volumes. Ainsi elles possèdent des propriétés avantageuses dans le cadre de la modélisation géométrique: gestion automatique de la topologie, garantie de manipuler des entités manifold, possibilité de définir des transitions lisses entre des objets se fusionnant. Elles furent cependant délaissées au début des années 2000 en raison des contraintes qu'elles imposent: évaluation et affichage coûteux en temps de calcul, et forme des surfaces difficilement contrôlables. Les contributions de cette thèse proposent des solutions à ces problématiques de la modélisation par surfaces implicites. Il est tout d'abord montré qu'une nouvelle structure d'accélération, combinant les propriétés d'une hiérarchie de volumes englobants et d'un Kd-Tree, permet d'accélérer l'affichage par lancer de rayons d'un grand nombre de surfaces implicites. Il est ainsi possible d'animer en temps réel une surface de type fluide, définie par les points d'isovaleur d'un champ potentiel obtenu par la somme de primitives simples. Les opérateurs simples de composition de surfaces implicites, tels que la somme, permettent d'évaluer rapidement des champs potentiels combinant plusieurs milliers de primitives. Néanmoins, l'apparence organique des surfaces produites est difficile à contrôler. Cette thèse propose un nouveau type d'opérateur de composition, utilisant à la fois les valeurs et les gradients des champs potentiels sources, qui permet d'avoir beaucoup plus de contrôle sur la forme des surfaces produites tout en supprimant les effets indésirables des opérateurs classiques, tels que le gonflement à l'intersection de surfaces ou la fusion de surfaces proches. Enfin il est montré comment ces opérateurs de mélange peuvent être utilisés pour déformer des surfaces de type maillage, animées par un squelette. Nous définissons un champ potentiel par composition de primitives implicites générées aux arêtes du squelette. A chaque déformation du squelette, le champ potentiel est lui aussi déformé par les opérateurs de composition choisis: ces déformations peuvent être reproduites sur le maillage en déplaçant chaque sommet du maillage jusqu'à la surface d'isovaleur correspondante à leur valeur de potentiel initiale. Cette technique permet d'obtenir rapidement des déformations plausibles au niveau des articulations des membres modélisésImplicit surfaces have been considered during the eightees as a promising alternative to parametric surfaces (NURBS patches, etc...). They are defined as the set of points having the same value of a scalar field, thus spliting the space into two volumes. Their volumetric nature confers them interesting properties for geometric modeling: the topology of objects is handled automatically, geometries are guaranteed to be manifold and they can produce smooth blendings of objects easily. However, they were abandoned at the beginning of the 21st century due to the limitations they impose: they are computationally expensive to evaluate and to display, and the shape of the transition between objects is difficult to control. This thesis proposes new solutions to these problems in implicit surfaces modeling. First of all, it is shown that the use of a new object-partitioning structure, mixing the properties of a bounding volume hierarchy and a Kd-Tree, makes it possible to raytrace a large number of implicit primitives at interactive frame rates. Therefore it allows real time visualization of fluid-like shapes, defined as an isosurface of a potential field computed as the sum of simple primitives. Simple composition operators of implicit surfaces, such as the sum operator, allow a fast computation of a potential field combining thousands of primitives. Nevertheless, the shape of the resulting surfaces is organic and difficult to control. In this thesis, a new kind of composition operators is proposed, which takes both the value and the gradient of the source potential fields as input. These operators give much more control on the shape of the surfaces, and they avoid the classical problems of implicit surfaces composition, such as bulging at the intersection of two primitives or blending of surfaces at a distance. Finally, a new skeleton-based animation technique is presented which reproduces the deformations of some implicit surfaces on a given mesh. We define a potential field as the composition of implicit primitives generated at the bones of the skeleton. Thus each motion of the skeleton will cause distortions in the associated potential field. These distortions can be reproduced on the mesh by moving each of its vertices to the isosurface of the potential field corresponding to their initial potential value. This technique is able to produce rapidly realistic deformations on the limbs of an articulated model of a bod

A Gradient-Based Implicit Blend

International audienceWe introduce a new family of binary composition operators that solves four major problems of constructive implicit modeling: suppressing bulges when two shapes merge, avoiding unwanted blending at a distance, ensuring that the resulting shape keeps the topology of the union, and enabling sharp details to be added without being blown up. The key idea is that field functions should not only be combined based on their values, but also on their gradients.We implement this idea through a family of C1 composition operators evaluated on the GPU for efficiency, and illustrate it by applications to constructive modeling and animation

Implicit Skinning: Real-Time Skin Deformation with Contact Modeling

SIGGRAPH 2013 Conference ProceedingsInternational audienceGeometric skinning techniques, such as smooth blending or dualquaternions, are very popular in the industry for their high performances, but fail to mimic realistic deformations. Other methods make use of physical simulation or control volume to better capture the skin behavior, yet they cannot deliver real-time feedback. In this paper, we present the first purely geometric method handling skin contact effects and muscular bulges in real-time. The insight is to exploit the advanced composition mechanism of volumetric, implicit representations for correcting the results of geometric skinning techniques. The mesh is first approximated by a set of implicit surfaces. At each animation step, these surfaces are combined in real-time and used to adjust the position of mesh vertices, starting from their smooth skinning position. This deformation step is done without any loss of detail and seamlessly handles contacts between skin parts. As it acts as a post-process, our method fits well into the standard animation pipeline. Moreover, it requires no intensive computation step such as collision detection, and therefore provides real-time performances

Blending of surfaces in real time : vizualization, control of shape deformation and application to geometric modeling

Les surfaces implicites ont été perçues au cours des années 80, comme une alternative intéressante aux modélisations paramétriques des surfaces (NURBS, etc). Elles sont définies comme l'ensemble des points de même valeur d'un champ potentiel, c'est-à-dire la frontière de deux volumes. Ainsi elles possèdent des propriétés avantageuses dans le cadre de la modélisation géométrique: gestion automatique de la topologie, garantie de manipuler des entités manifold, possibilité de définir des transitions lisses entre des objets se fusionnant. Elles furent cependant délaissées au début des années 2000 en raison des contraintes qu'elles imposent: évaluation et affichage coûteux en temps de calcul, et forme des surfaces difficilement contrôlables. Les contributions de cette thèse proposent des solutions à ces problématiques de la modélisation par surfaces implicites. Il est tout d'abord montré qu'une nouvelle structure d'accélération, combinant les propriétés d'une hiérarchie de volumes englobants et d'un Kd-Tree, permet d'accélérer l'affichage par lancer de rayons d'un grand nombre de surfaces implicites. Il est ainsi possible d'animer en temps réel une surface de type fluide, définie par les points d'isovaleur d'un champ potentiel obtenu par la somme de primitives simples. Les opérateurs simples de composition de surfaces implicites, tels que la somme, permettent d'évaluer rapidement des champs potentiels combinant plusieurs milliers de primitives. Néanmoins, l'apparence organique des surfaces produites est difficile à contrôler. Cette thèse propose un nouveau type d'opérateur de composition, utilisant à la fois les valeurs et les gradients des champs potentiels sources, qui permet d'avoir beaucoup plus de contrôle sur la forme des surfaces produites tout en supprimant les effets indésirables des opérateurs classiques, tels que le gonflement à l'intersection de surfaces ou la fusion de surfaces proches. Enfin il est montré comment ces opérateurs de mélange peuvent être utilisés pour déformer des surfaces de type maillage, animées par un squelette. Nous définissons un champ potentiel par composition de primitives implicites générées aux arêtes du squelette. A chaque déformation du squelette, le champ potentiel est lui aussi déformé par les opérateurs de composition choisis: ces déformations peuvent être reproduites sur le maillage en déplaçant chaque sommet du maillage jusqu'à la surface d'isovaleur correspondante à leur valeur de potentiel initiale. Cette technique permet d'obtenir rapidement des déformations plausibles au niveau des articulations des membres modélisésImplicit surfaces have been considered during the eightees as a promising alternative to parametric surfaces (NURBS patches, etc...). They are defined as the set of points having the same value of a scalar field, thus spliting the space into two volumes. Their volumetric nature confers them interesting properties for geometric modeling: the topology of objects is handled automatically, geometries are guaranteed to be manifold and they can produce smooth blendings of objects easily. However, they were abandoned at the beginning of the 21st century due to the limitations they impose: they are computationally expensive to evaluate and to display, and the shape of the transition between objects is difficult to control. This thesis proposes new solutions to these problems in implicit surfaces modeling. First of all, it is shown that the use of a new object-partitioning structure, mixing the properties of a bounding volume hierarchy and a Kd-Tree, makes it possible to raytrace a large number of implicit primitives at interactive frame rates. Therefore it allows real time visualization of fluid-like shapes, defined as an isosurface of a potential field computed as the sum of simple primitives. Simple composition operators of implicit surfaces, such as the sum operator, allow a fast computation of a potential field combining thousands of primitives. Nevertheless, the shape of the resulting surfaces is organic and difficult to control. In this thesis, a new kind of composition operators is proposed, which takes both the value and the gradient of the source potential fields as input. These operators give much more control on the shape of the surfaces, and they avoid the classical problems of implicit surfaces composition, such as bulging at the intersection of two primitives or blending of surfaces at a distance. Finally, a new skeleton-based animation technique is presented which reproduces the deformations of some implicit surfaces on a given mesh. We define a potential field as the composition of implicit primitives generated at the bones of the skeleton. Thus each motion of the skeleton will cause distortions in the associated potential field. These distortions can be reproduced on the mesh by moving each of its vertices to the isosurface of the potential field corresponding to their initial potential value. This technique is able to produce rapidly realistic deformations on the limbs of an articulated model of a bod

BVH for efficient raytracing of dynamic metaballs on GPU

International audienceMetaballs [Bloomenthal 1997] are effective to represent fluids and similar complex and deformable geometries, but their implicit nature makes difficult their visualization in real time. A common strategy is to tessellate the resulting isosurface and to render it on GPU, but it scales poorly as the number of metaballs increases. Kanamori et al. [2008] efficiently raycast thousands of metaballs without intermediate representations. Their method assumes that rays are shot from a single viewpoint, thus preventing secondary effects (no shadows, reflections, etc.), and is limited to polynomial density functions. We propose to exploit the culling capacity of dynamic bounding volume hierarchies (BVH) [Wald 2007], the secant method for ray-surface intersection, and CPU-GPU parallelism to alleviate the restrictions of their method. This results in a general raytracing method, allowing arbitrary ray intersection (visibility, shadow, reflection, refraction, etc.) with metaballs of any finite-support at interactive performances

Fitted BVH for Fast Raytracing of Metaballs

International audienceRaytracing metaballs is a problem that has numerous applications in the rendering of dynamic soft objects such as fluids. However, current techniques are either limited in the visual effects that they can render or their performance drops as the number of metaballs and their density increase. We present a new acceleration structure based on BVH and kd-tree for efficient raytracing of a large number of metaballs. This structure is built from an adapted SAH using a fast greedy algorithm and allows the visualization of several hundreds of thousands metaballs at interactive-to-real-time framerates. Our method can handle arbitrary rays to simulate any complex secondary effects such as reflections or soft shadows, and is robust with respect to the density of metaballs. We achieve this performance thanks to a balanced CPU-GPU (using CUDA) implementation of the animation, structure creation, and rendering