Real-time smoke rendering using compensated ray marching

We present a real-time algorithm called compensated ray march-ing for rendering of smoke under dynamic low-frequency environ-ment lighting. Our approach is based on a decomposition of the input smoke animation, represented as a sequence of volumetric density fields, into a set of radial basis functions (RBFs) and a se-quence of residual fields. To expedite rendering, the source radi-ance distribution within the smoke is computed from only the low-frequency RBF approximation of the density fields, since the high-frequency residuals have little impact on global illumination under low-frequency environment lighting. Furthermore, in computing source radiances the contributions from single and multiple scatter-ing are evaluated at only the RBF centers and then approximated at other points in the volume using an RBF-based interpolation. A slice-based integration of these source radiances along each view ray is then performed to render the final image. The high-frequency residual fields, which are a critical component in the local appear-ance of smoke, are compensated back into the radiance integral dur-ing this ray march to generate images of high detail. The runtime algorithm, which includes both light transfer simula-tion and ray marching, can be easily implemented on the GPU, and thus allows for real-time manipulation of viewpoint and lighting, as well as interactive editing of smoke attributes such as extinction cross section, scattering albedo, and phase function. Only moderate preprocessing time and storage is needed. This approach provides the first method for real-time smoke rendering that includes sin-gle and multiple scattering while generating results comparable in quality to offline algorithms like ray tracing

Swin3D: A Pretrained Transformer Backbone for 3D Indoor Scene Understanding

Pretrained backbones with fine-tuning have been widely adopted in 2D vision and natural language processing tasks and demonstrated significant advantages to task-specific networks. In this paper, we present a pretrained 3D backbone, named {\SST}, which first outperforms all state-of-the-art methods in downstream 3D indoor scene understanding tasks. Our backbone network is based on a 3D Swin transformer and carefully designed to efficiently conduct self-attention on sparse voxels with linear memory complexity and capture the irregularity of point signals via generalized contextual relative positional embedding. Based on this backbone design, we pretrained a large {\SST} model on a synthetic Structed3D dataset that is 10 times larger than the ScanNet dataset and fine-tuned the pretrained model in various downstream real-world indoor scene understanding tasks. The results demonstrate that our model pretrained on the synthetic dataset not only exhibits good generality in both downstream segmentation and detection on real 3D point datasets, but also surpasses the state-of-the-art methods on downstream tasks after fine-tuning with +2.3 mIoU and +2.2 mIoU on S3DIS Area5 and 6-fold semantic segmentation, +2.1 mIoU on ScanNet segmentation (val), +1.9 [email protected] on ScanNet detection, +8.1 [email protected] on S3DIS detection. Our method demonstrates the great potential of pretrained 3D backbones with fine-tuning for 3D understanding tasks. The code and models are available at https://github.com/microsoft/Swin3D

Low Distortion Shell Map Generation

A shell map (Porumbescu et al., 2005) is a bijective mapping between shell space (the space between a base surface and its offset) and texture space. It can be used to generate small-scale features on surfaces using a variety of modeling techniques. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm, which reduces distortion by construction, for the offset surface generation of triangular meshes. The basic idea is to independently offset each triangle of the base mesh, and then stitch them up by solving a Poisson equation. We then introduce the details for computation of a stretch metric, which measures the distortion of shell maps. Our results show a substantial improvement compared to previous results