Measured BRDFs, which are acquired by measuring the reflectance of real-world materials, can reproduce the material appearance faithfully. The measured reflectance is a mixture of reflection components with different properties, such as diffuse reflections and specular reflections. However, recent applications, including light-probe rendering and denoising often require the separated representation of BRDFs to apply each component to different pipelines for efficient rendering. This paper proposes a separation method of isotropic measured spectral BRDFs to handle goniochromatic effects based on the spectral microfacet BRDF and diffraction microfacet BRDF models. Experimental results show that our method can increase the PSNR to about 30 dB compared with the previous method.

Measured bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs) can accurately represent the measured material appearance but suffer from high storage costs and lack editability due to their high dimensionality. Recent advances in efficient acquisition techniques extend the dimensionality of measured BRDFs from 3D (isotropic) to 4D (anisotropic) and from RGB to spectra. This, however, further compounds the issues of measured BRDFs and limits their practical use. This paper proposes a non-parametric factor representation for measured anisotropic spectral BRDFs. Based on microfacet theory, our method decomposes 4D measured anisotropic BRDF per spectrum into low-dimensional, editable factors. We further compress the spectral domain of decomposed factors using principal component analysis. Experimental results show that our method can compress measured anisotropic spectral BRDFs 1/40 on average and up to 1/333. Our method also provides several editing tools for each factor to enhance the editability of measured anisotropic spectral BRDFs.

Artificial light sources make our daily life convenient, but cause a severe problem called light pollution. We propose a novel system for efficient visualization of light pollution in the night sky. Numerous methods have been proposed for rendering the sky, but most of these focus on rendering of the daytime or the sunset sky where the sun is the only, or dominant light source. For the visualization of the light pollution, however, we must consider many city light sources on the ground, resulting in excessive computational cost. We address this problem by precomputing a set of intensity distributions for the sky illuminated by city light at various locations and with different atmospheric conditions. We apply a principal component analysis and fast Fourier transform to the precomputed distributions, allowing us to efficiently visualize the extent of the light pollution. Using this method, we can achieve one to two orders of magnitudes faster computation compared to a naive approach that simply accumulates the scattered intensity for each viewing ray. Furthermore, the fast computation allows us to interactively solve the inverse problem that determines the city light intensity needed to reduce light pollution. Our system provides the user with both a forward and inverse investigation tool for the study and minimization of light pollution.

Rendering a translucent material involves integrating the product of the transmittance-weighted irradiance and the BSSRDF over the surface of it. In previous methods, this spatial integral was computed by creating a dense distribution of discrete points over the surface or by importance-sampling based on the BSSRDF. Both of these approaches necessitate specifying the number of samples, which affects both the quality and the computation time for rendering. An insufficient number of samples leads to noise and artifacts in the rendered image and an excessive number results in a prohibitively long rendering time. In this article, we propose an error estimation method for translucent materials in a many-light rendering framework. Our adaptive sampling can automatically determine the number of samples so that the estimated relative error of each pixel intensity is less than a user-specified threshold. We also propose an efficient method to generate the sampling points that make large contributions to the pixel intensity taking into account the BSSRDF. This enables us to use a simple uniform sampling, instead of costly importance sampling based on the BSSRDF. The experimental results show that our method can accurately estimate the error. In addition, in comparison with the previous methods, our sampling method achieves better estimation accuracy in equal-time.

The reflection of a bright light source on a dynamic surface such as water with waves can be difficult to render well in real time due to reflection aliasing and flickering. In this paper, we propose a solution to this problem by approximating the reflection direction distribution for the water surface as an elliptical Gaussian distribution. Then we analytically integrate the reflection contribution throughout the rendering interval time. Our method can render in real time an animation of the time integrated reflection of a spherical light source on highly dynamic waves with reduced aliasing and flickering.

Abstract Recent advances in bidirectional path tracing (BPT) reveal that the use of multiple light sub‐paths and the resampling of a small number of these can improve the efficiency of BPT. By increasing the number of pre‐sampled light sub‐paths, the possibility of generating light paths that provide large contributions can be better explored and this can alleviate the correlation of light paths due to the reuse of pre‐sampled light sub‐paths by all eye sub‐paths. The increased number of pre‐sampled light subpaths, however, also incurs a high computational cost. In this paper, we propose a two‐stage resampling method for BPT to efficiently handle a large number of pre‐sampled light sub‐paths. We also derive a weighting function that can treat the changes in path probability due to the two‐stage resampling. Our method can handle a two orders of magnitude larger number of presampled light sub‐paths than previous methods in equal‐time rendering, resulting in stable and better noise reduction than state‐of‐the‐art methods.

Bidirectional path tracing (BPT) with multiple importance sampling (MIS) is a popular technique for rendering realistic images. Recently, it has been shown that BPT can be improved by preparing multiple light sub-paths and by resampling a small number of light sub-paths from them to generate full paths with large contribution. Traditionally, for MIS weights, the balance heuristic has widely been used to minimize the upper bound of variance, where each full path is weighted in proportion to the probability of the path. Although the probability of the path can change due to the resampling process, the weighting functions used in the previous methods remain unaffected by the change in probability, resulting in less efficiency. To address this problem, we propose new weighting functions for BPT with multiple light sub-paths. Our main contribution is a precise formulation of the variance and the derivation of the weighting functions that can appropriately treat the change in probability. We demonstrate that our weighting functions significantly improve the image quality. We will release a simple version of our implementation as open source to ensure reproducibility.

In many-light rendering, a variety of visual and illumination effects, including anti-aliasing, depth of field, volumetric scattering, and subsurface scattering, are combined to create a number of virtual point lights (VPLs). This is done in order to simplify computation of the resulting illumination. Naive approaches that sum the direct illumination from many VPLs are computationally expensive; scalable methods can be computed more efficiently by clustering VPLs, and then estimating their sum by sampling a small number of VPLs. Although significant speed-up has been achieved using scalable methods, clustering leads to uncontrollable errors, resulting in noise in the rendered images. In this paper, we propose a method to improve the estimation accuracy of many-light rendering involving such visual and illumination effects. We demonstrate that our method can improve the estimation accuracy by a factor of 2.3 over the previous method.

Abstract Solving the pressure Poisson equation dominates a large portion of computational time for incompressible fluid flow simulations. To solve the pressure Poisson equation efficiently, geometric multigrid methods are used directly or used as the preconditioner for the conjugate gradient (CG) method. Conventionally, the V‐cycle multigrid method is widely employed, and little attention has been paid to other cycles. In this paper, we introduce the sawtooth cycle multigrid method and its simple extension called N‐cycle, which provides better convergence in equal time comparison with the V‐cycle as a direct solver of the pressure Poisson equation. We also apply the N‐cycle to the preconditioner of the CG method and show that the N‐cycle multigrid CG method can provide better convergence than the V‐cycle multigrid CG method.

A great deal of attention has been devoted to the fabrication of reflectors that can display different color images when viewed from different directions not only in industry but also for the arts. Although such reflectors have previously been successfully fabricated, the number of images displayed has been limited to two or they suffer from ghosting artifacts where mixed images appear. Furthermore, the previous methods need special hardware and/or materials to fabricate the reflectors. Thus, those techniques are not suitable for printing reflectors on everyday personal objects made of different materials, such as name cards, letter sheets, envelopes, and plastic cases. To overcome these limitations, we propose a method for fabricating reflectors using a standard ultraviolet printer (UV printer). UV printer can render a specified 2D color pattern on an arbitrary material and by overprinting the printed pattern can be raised, that is, the printed pattern becomes a microstructure having color and height. We propose using these micro structures to formulate a method for designing spatially varying reflections that can display different target images when viewed from different directions. The microstructure is calculated by minimizing an objective function that measures the differences between the intensities of the light reflected from the reflector and that of the target image. We show several fabricated reflectors to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method.

In this paper, we propose a modeling method of clouds from a single photograph. To synthesize realistic images of outdoor scenes, modeling of 3D clouds is necessary. However, synthesizing realistic clouds is still a difficult task. To address this problem, we propose an example-based volume texture synthesis to model nonhomogeneous density volumes. Our method prepares an example cloud volume data using a physically-based fluid simulator. Then the output cloud volume is automatically synthesized from the example cloud volume data so that its rendered image becomes similar to the clouds in the input photograph. In contrast to the previous texture synthesis methods, our method synthesizes density volumes taking into account scattering and transmittance of light. We show several cloud volumes whose rendered images are similar to the input photograph.

Clouds play an important role when synthesizing realistic images of outdoor scenes. The realistic display of clouds is therefore one of the important research topics in computer graphics. In order to display realistic clouds, we need methods for modeling, rendering, and animating clouds realistically. It is also important to control the shapes and appearances of clouds to create certain visual effects. In this paper, we explain our efforts and research results to meet such requirements, together with related researches on the visual simulation of clouds.

Abstract The popularity of many‐light rendering, which converts complex global illumination computations into a simple sum of the illumination from virtual point lights (VPLs), for predictive rendering has increased in recent years. A huge number of VPLs are usually required for predictive rendering at the cost of extensive computational time. While previous methods can achieve significant speedup by clustering VPLs, none of these previous methods can estimate the total errors due to clustering. This drawback imposes on users tedious trial and error processes to obtain rendered images with reliable accuracy. In this paper, we propose an error estimation framework for many‐light rendering. Our method transforms VPL clustering into stratified sampling combined with confidence intervals, which enables the user to estimate the error due to clustering without the costly computing required to sum the illumination from all the VPLs. Our estimation framework is capable of handling arbitrary BRDFs and is accelerated by using visibility caching, both of which make our method more practical. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can estimate the error much more accurately than the previous clustering method.

Abstract This paper proposes an interactive rendering method of cloth fabrics under environment lighting. The outgoing radiance from cloth fabrics in the microcylinder model is calculated by integrating the product of the distant environment lighting, the visibility function, the weighting function that includes shadowing/masking effects of threads, and the light scattering function of threads. The radiance calculation at each shading point of the cloth fabrics is simplified to a linear combination of triple product integrals of two circular Gaussians and the visibility function, multiplied by precomputed spherical Gaussian convolutions of the weighting function. We propose an efficient calculation method of the triple product of two circular Gaussians and the visibility function by using the gradient of signed distance function to the visibility boundary where the binary visibility changes in the angular domain of the hemisphere. Our GPU implementation enables interactive rendering of static cloth fabrics with dynamic viewpoints and lighting. In addition, interactive editing of parameters for the scattering function (e.g. thread's albedo) that controls the visual appearances of cloth fabrics can be achieved.

We present a technique for computing the shape of a transparent object that can generate user-defined caustic patterns. The surface of the object generated using our method is smooth. Thanks to this property, the resulting caustic pattern is smooth, natural, and highly detailed compared to the results btained using previous methods. Our method consists of two processes. First, we use a differential geometry approach to compute a smooth mapping between the distributions of the incident light and the light reaching the screen. Second, we utilize this mapping to compute the surface of the object. We solve Poisson's equation to compute both the mapping and the surface of the object.

Abstract We propose an efficient rendering method for dynamic scenes under all‐frequency environmental lighting. To render the surfaces of objects illuminated by distant environmental lighting, the triple product of the lighting, the visibility function and the BRDF is integrated at each shading point on the surfaces. Our method represents the environmental lighting and the BRDF with a linear combination of spherical Gaussians, replacing the integral of the triple product with the sum of the integrals of spherical Gaussians over the visible region of the hemisphere. We propose a new form of spherical Gaussian, the integral spherical Gaussian, that enables the fast and accurate integration of spherical Gaussians with various sharpness over the visible region on the hemisphere. The integral spherical Gaussian simplifies the integration to a sum of four pre‐integrated values, which are easily evaluated on‐the‐fly. With a combination of a set of spheres to approximate object geometries and the integral spherical Gaussian, our method can render object surfaces very efficiently. Our GPU implementation demonstrates realtime rendering of dynamic scenes with dynamic viewpoints, lighting, and BRDFs.

Abstract Pixel art is a kind of digital art that through per‐pixel manipulation enables production of a diverse array of artistic images. In this paper, we present a new way for people to experience and express pixel art. Our digital art consists of a set of sticks made of acrylate resin, each of which refracts light from a parallel light source, in certain directions. Artistic users are able to easily rearrange these sticks and view their digital art through the refracted light projection on any planar surface. As we demonstrate in this paper, a user can generate various artistic images using only a single set of sticks. We additionally envision that our pixel art with rearrangeable sticks would have great entertainment appeal, e.g., as an art puzzle.

We present a new technique for bi-scale material editing using Spherical Gaussians (SGs). To represent large-scale appearances, an effective BRDF that is the average reflectance of small-scale details is used. The effective BRDF is calculated from the integral of the product of the Bidirectional Visible Normal Distribution (BVNDF) and BRDFs of small-scale geometry. Our method represents the BVNDF with a sum of SGs, which can be calculated on-the-fly, enabling interactive editing of small-scale geometry. By representing small-scale BRDFs with a sum of SGs, effective BRDFs can be calculated analytically by convolving the SGs for BVNDF and BRDF. We propose a new SG representation based on convolution of two SGs, which allows real-time rendering of effective BRDFs under all-frequency environment lighting and real-time editing of small-scale BRDFs. In contrast to the previous method, our method does not require extensive precomputation time and large volume of precomputed data per single BRDF, which makes it possible to implement our method on a GPU, resulting in real-time rendering.

Real-time rendering of dynamic scenes illuminated by complex, all-frequency lighting with highly glossy BRDFs remains a challenging problem. Although several methods have been proposed to render dynamic scenes, these methods can not handle deformable objects [Zhou et al. 2005], all-frequency lighting [Ren et al. 2006; Nowrouzezahrai et al. 2009], or highly glossy BRDFs [Annen et al. 2008].

Abstract Photo‐realistic rendering of inhomogeneous participating media with light scattering in consideration is important in computer graphics, and is typically computed using Monte Carlo based methods. The key technique in such methods is the free path sampling, which is used for determining the distance (free path) between successive scattering events. Recently, it has been shown that efficient and unbiased free path sampling methods can be constructed based on Woodcock tracking. The key concept for improving the efficiency is to utilize space partitioning (e.g., kd‐tree or uniform grid), and a better space partitioning scheme is important for better sampling efficiency. Thus, an estimation framework for investigating the gain in sampling efficiency is important for determining how to partition the space. However, currently, there is no estimation framework that works in 3D space. In this paper, we propose a new estimation framework to overcome this problem. Using our framework, we can analytically estimate the sampling efficiency for any typical partitioned space. Conversely, we can also use this estimation framework for determining the optimal space partitioning. As an application, we show that new space partitioning schemes can be constructed using our estimation framework. Moreover, we show that the differences in the performances using different schemes can be predicted fairly well using our estimation framework.

Interactive rendering under complex real world illumination is essential for many applications such as material design, lighting design, and virtual realities. For such applications, interactive manipulations of viewpoints, lighting, BRDFs, and positions of objects are beneficial to designers and users. This paper proposes a system that acquires complex, all-frequency lighting environments and renders dynamic scenes under captured illumination, for lighting and material design applications in cyber worlds. To capture real world lighting environments easily, our method uses a camera equipped with a cellular phone. To handle dynamic scenes of rigid objects and dynamic BRDFs, our method decomposes the visibility function at each vertex of each object into the occlusion due to the object itself and occlusions due to other objects, which are represented by a nonlinear piecewise constant approximation, called cuts. Our method proposes a compact cut representation and efficient algorithm for cut operations. By using our system, interactive manipulation of positions of objects and real time rendering with dynamic viewpoints, lighting, and BRDFs can be achieved.

Abstract The visual simulation of natural phenomena has been widely studied. Although several methods have been proposed to simulate melting, the flows of meltwater drops on the surfaces of objects are not taken into account. In this paper, we propose a particle‐based method for the simulation of the melting and freezing of ice objects and the interactions between ice and fluids. To simulate the flow of meltwater on ice and the formation of water droplets, a simple interfacial tension is proposed, which can be easily incorporated into common particle‐based simulation methods such as Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics. The computations of heat transfer, the phase transition between ice and water, the interactions between ice and fluids, and the separation of ice due to melting are further accelerated by implementing our method using CUDA. We demonstrate our simulation and rendering method for depicting melting ice at interactive frame‐rates.

Realistic rendering of participating media is one of the major subjects in computer graphics. Monte Carlo techniques are widely used for realistic rendering because they provide unbiased solutions, which converge to exact solutions. Methods based on Monte Carlo techniques generate a number of light paths, each of which consists of a set of randomly selected scattering events. Finding a new scattering event requires free path sampling to determine the distance from the previous scattering event, and is usually a time-consuming process for inhomogeneous participating media. To address this problem, we propose an adaptive and unbiased sampling technique using kd-tree based space partitioning. A key contribution of our method is an automatic scheme that partitions the spatial domain into sub-spaces (partitions) based on a cost model that evaluates the expected sampling cost. The magnitude of performance gain obtained by our method becomes larger for more inhomogeneous media, and rises to two orders compared to traditional free path sampling techniques.

Abstract A rendering system for interior scenes is proposed in this paper. The light reaches the interior scene, usually through small regions, such as windows or abat‐jours, which we call portals. To provide a solution, suitable for rendering interior scenes with portals, we extend the traditional precomputed radiance transfer approaches. In our approach, a bounding sphere, which we call a shell, of the interior, centered at each portal, is created and the light transferred from the shell towards the interior through the portal is precomputed. Each shell acts as an environment light source and its intensity distribution is determined by rendering images of the scene, viewed from the center of the shell. By updating the intensity distribution of the shell at each frame, we are able to handle dynamic objects outside the shells. The material of the portals can also be modified at run time (e.g. changing from transparent glass to frosted glass). Several applications are shown, including the illumination of a cathedral, lit by skylight at different times of a day, and a car, running in a town, at interactive frame rates, with a dynamic viewpoint.

In this paper, we propose a fast global illumination solution for interactive lighting design. Using our method, light sources and the viewpoint are movable, and the characteristics of materials can be modified (assuming low-frequency BRDF) during rendering. Our solution is based on particle tracing (a variation of photon mapping) and final gathering. We assume that objects in the input scene are static, and pre-compute potential light paths for particle tracing and final gathering. To perform final gathering fast, we propose an efficient technique called Hierarchical Histogram Estimation for rapid estimation of radiances from the distribution of the particles. The rendering process of our method can be fully implemented on the GPU and our method achieves interactive frame rates for rendering scenes with even more than 100,000 triangles.

In the field of computer graphics, simulation of physical phenomena is of great interest. We focus on the optical effects of soap bubbles. Soap bubbles have fascinating coloration and interesting physical properties. Therefore they are useful for the entertainment such as movies and games. Soap bubbles change their shapes by surface tension and external forces, and therefore their surface thickness also changes. Since the thickness of the soap bubble is several hundred nanometers, interference of the light occurs. This paper proposes a fast rendering method for the soap bubbles taking into account light interference and dynamics. In our method, the reflectivities of the thin film that is the cause of the light interference are calculated in advance and stored as textures. This makes it possible to render the de-formable soap bubbles in real-time.

Caustics are patterns of light formed by reflection or refraction of light from objects, and several methods have been developed to render caustics because of their visually beautiful patterns. This paper proposes a method for the rapid rendering of caustics formed by refracted light through transparent objects. First, a preprocess is used to generate sampling rays incident on each vertex of the object, and, taking refraction into account, to trace the rays until they leave the object. The position and direction of each ray that finally leaves the transparent object are obtained and stored in a lookup table. Next, in the rendering process, when the object is illuminated, the position and direction of the rays leaving the object are calculated using the lookup table. This makes it possible to render refractive caustics due to transparent objects at interactive frame rates even if the direction of the light changes and the object is translated or rotated.

The importance of informal communication on the Internet has been increasing in recent years. Several systems for informal communication are currently available to the public. These systems, however, require a particular server and/or specialized 3D content. In this paper, we propose a system for informal communication in a 3D virtual environment. The system makes 3D virtual worlds from existing common 2D HTML documents. Browsers communicate in a peer-to-peer manner. Construction and management of the system can be achieved with ease and at low cost in contrast with existing 3D virtual communication systems. Our results show that users shared interests by gaze awareness.

Abstract In order to synthesize realistic images of scenes that include water surfaces, the rendering of optical effectscaused by waves on the water surface, such as caustics and reflection, is necessary. However, rendering causticsis quite complex and time‐consuming. In recent years, the performance of graphics hardware has made significantprogress. This fact encourages researchers to study the acceleration of realistic image synthesis. We present herea method for the fast rendering of refractive and reflective caustics due to water surfaces. In the proposed method,an object is expressed by a set of texture mapped slices. We calculate the intensities of the caustics on the objectby using the slices and store the intensities as textures. This makes it possible to render caustics at interactive rateby using graphics hardware. Moreover, we render objects that are reflected and refracted due to the water surfaceby using reflection/refraction mapping of these slices. Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): I.3.1 [Computer Graphics]: Hardware Architecture I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three‐Dimensional Graphics and Realism

Abstract The display of realistic natural scenes is one of the most important research areas in computer graphics. Therendering of water is one of the essential components. This paper proposes an efficient method for renderingimages of scenes within water. For underwater scenery, the shafts of light and caustics are attractive and importantelements. However, computing these effects is difficult and time‐consuming since light refracts when passingthrough waves. To address the problem, our method makes use of graphics hardware to accelerate the computation.Our method displays the shafts of light by accumulating the intensities of streaks of light by using hardware colorblending functions. Making use of a Z‐buffer and a stencil buffer accelerates the rendering of caustics. Moreover,by using a shadow mapping technique, our method can display shafts of light and caustics taking account ofshadows due to objects. ACM CSS: I. 3.1 Computer Graphics—Hardware Architecture, I. 3.7 Computer Graphics—Three‐DimensionalGraphics and Realism

The display of realistic natural scenes is one of the most important research areas in computer graphics. The rendering of water is one of the essential components. The paper proposes an efficient method for rendering images of scenes within water. For underwater scenery, the shafts of light and caustics are attractive and important elements. However, computing these effects is difficult and time-consuming, since light refracts when passing through waves. To address the problem, our method makes use of graphics hardware to accelerate the computation. Our method displays the shafts of light by accumulating the intensities of streaks of light by using hardware color blending functions. The rendering of caustics is accelerated by making use of a Z-buffer and a stencil buffer. Moreover, by using a shadow mapping technique, our method can display shafts of light and caustics, taking account of shadows due to objects.