Toward Evaluating Progressive Rendering Methods in Appearance Design Tasks

Progressive rendering is becoming a popular alternative to precomputation approaches for appearance design tasks. Images created by different progressive algorithms exhibit various kinds of visual artifacts at the early stages of computation. We present a user study that investigates the effects of these artifacts on user performance in appearance design tasks. Specifically, we ask both novice and expert subjects to perform lighting and material editing tasks with the following algorithms: random path tracing, quasi-random path tracing, progressive photon mapping, and virtual point light (VPL) rendering. Data collected from the experiments suggest that path tracing is strongly preferred to progressive photon mapping and VPL rendering by both experts and novices. There is no indication that quasi-random path tracing is systematically preferred to random path tracing or vice versa; the same holds between progressive photon mapping and VPL rendering. Interestingly, we did not observe any significant difference in user workflow for the different algorithms. As can be expected, experts are faster and more accurate than novices, but surprisingly both groups have similar subjective preferences and workflow

Image-based remapping of spatially-varying material appearance

BRDF models are ubiquitous tools for the representation of material appearance. However, there is now an astonishingly large number of different models in practical use. Both a lack of BRDF model standardisation across implementations found in different renderers, as well as the often semantically different capabilities of various models, have grown to be a major hindrance to the interchange of production assets between different rendering systems. Current attempts to solve this problem rely on manually finding visual similarities between models, or mathematical ones between their functional shapes, which requires access to the shader implementation, usually unavailable in commercial renderers. We present a method for automatic translation of material appearance between different BRDF models, which uses an image-based metric for appearance comparison, and that delegates the interaction with the model to the renderer. We analyse the performance of the method, both with respect to robustness and visual differences of the fits for multiple combinations of BRDF models. While it is effective for individual BRDFs, the computational cost does not scale well for spatially-varying BRDFs. Therefore, we further present a parametric regression scheme that approximates the shape of the transformation function and generates a reduced representation which evaluates instantly and without further interaction with the renderer. We present respective visual comparisons of the remapped SVBRDF models for commonly used renderers and shading models, and show that our approach is able to extrapolate transformed BRDF parameters better than other complex regression schemes

illumination cohérente pour la simulation d'éclairage

Simulation of light transport in a scene is an essential task in realistic image synthesis. However, an accurate simulation of light as it bounces in the scene is time consuming. It has been shown that a key to speeding up light transport simulation algorithms is to take advantage of the high degree of spatial, angular, and temporal coherence. In this thesis we make three contributions in this area. First, we propose spatial directional radiance caching (SDRC) for accelerating the light transport simulation in scenes with glossy surfaces. The SDRC algorithm takes advantage of the smoothness of shading on glossy surfaces by interpolating the indirect illumination from a set of sparsely distributed radiance samples that are both spatially and directionally close. In the next part of the thesis, we propose an efficient and accurate local principal component analysis (LPCA) algorithm for dimensionality reduction and data compression of large data sets. To achieve efficiency our new algorithm, called SortCluster-LPCA, passes various information from previous iteration to the next. Improved accuracy is achieved through better initial seeding of cluster centroids in LPCA. Finally, we describe a work in progress focusing on the development of an algorithm for interactive relighting of animation sequences with indirect illumination. We formulate the relighting problem as a large 3D array expressing light propagation in a scene over multiple frames. We suggest an adaptive algorithm to make the pre-computation tractable exploiting coherence in light transport.La simulation de la propagation de la lumière dans une scène est une tâche essentielle en synthèse d'images réalistes. Cependant, une simulation correcte de la lumière ainsi que ses différents rebonds dans la scène reste couteuse en temps de calcul. Premièrement, nous proposons l'algorithme de cache de luminance spatial et directionnel SDRC. L'algorithme SDRC tire parti du fait que les variations d'éclairage sont douces sur les surfaces brillantes. L'éclairage en un point de la scène est alors calculé en interpolant l'éclairage indirect connu pour un ensemble d'échantillons de luminance spatialement proches et de directions similaires. Dans la partie suivante, nous présentons un algorithme efficace et précis d'analyse locale en composantes principales LPCA pour réduire la dimension et compresser un grandensemble de données. Pour améliorer l'efficacité de notre nouvel algoritme celui-ci propage les informations issues d'une itération à une itération suivante. En choisissant une meilleure graine initiale pour les centroïdes des clusters dans LPCA, la précision de la méthode est améliorée et produit une meilleure classification des données. Enfin, nous décrivons des travaux en cours de réalisation concernant une méthode de ré-éclairage interactif d'une séquence animée en prenant en compte l'éclairage indirect. Le problème de ré-éclairage est représenté sous la forme d'une grande matrice 3D représentant la propagation de la lumière dans la scène pour plusieurs images de la séquence. Un algorithme adaptatif pré-calcule la propagation de la lumière en exploitant les cohérences potentielles.RENNES1-BU Sciences Philo (352382102) / SudocSudocFranceF

Adaptive Mesh Subdivision for Precomputed Radiance Transfer

In precomputed radiance transfer (PRT), the radiance transfer operator is precomputed on vertices of a mesh. During rendering the transfer operator is combined with illumination to produce global illumination effects at real-time frame rates. However, visible error can be introduced by interpolating the transferred radiance between vertices. We propose to adaptively subdivide meshes with PRT in order to avoid the interpolation error. The mesh density is increased where the transferred radiance can change rapidly and introduce high error. We exploit the fact that the illumination frequency in PRT is bounded and thus we are able to perform the subdivision during the preprocessing phase. This obviates the need for dynamic mesh subdivision at render-time. The adaptive subdivision is guided by an error measure based on the transfer operator

A Novel Hemispherical Basis For Accurate And Efficient Rendering

This paper presents a new set of hemispherical basis functions dedicated to hemispherical data representation. These functions are derived from associated Legendre polynomials. We demonstrate the usefulness of this basis for representation of surface reflectance functions, rendering using environment maps and for efficient global illumination computation using radiance caching. We show that our basis is more appropriate for hemispherical functions than spherical harmonics. This basis can be efficiently combined with spherical harmonics in applications involving both hemispherical and spherical data. © The Eurographics Association 2004