The appearance of hair plays a critical role in synthesizing realistic looking human characters. However, due to the high complexity in hair geometry and the scattering nature of hair fibers, rendering hair with photorealistic quality and at interactive speeds remains as an open problem in computer graphics. Previous approaches attempt to simplify the scattering model to only tackle a specific aspect of the scattering effects. In this paper, we present a new approach to simultaneously render complex scattering effects including volumetric shadows, transparency, and antialiasing under a unified framework. Our solution uses a shadow-ray path to produce volumetric self-shadows and an additional view-ray path to produce transparency. To compute and accumulate the contribution of individual hair fibers along each (shadow or view) path, we develop a new GPU-based k-buffer technique that can efficiently locate the K nearest scattering locations and combine them in the correct order. Compared with existing multi-layer based approaches[Kim and Neumann 2001; Yuksel and Keyser 2008; Sintorn and Assarsson 2009], we show that our k-buffer solution can more accurately reproduce the shadowing and transparency effects. Further, we present an anti-aliasing scheme that directly builds upon the k-buffer. We implement all three effects (volumetric shadows, transparency, and anti-aliasing) under a unified rendering pipeline. Experiments on complex hair models demonstrate that our new solution produces near photorealistic hair rendering at very interactive speed.

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There are strong indications that the future of interactive graphics involves a more flexible programming model than today's OpenGL/Direct3D pipelines. That means that graphics developers will need a basic understanding of how to combine emerging parallel-programming techniques with the traditional interactive rendering pipeline.

Abstract We introduce a method to dynamically construct highly concurrent linked lists on modern graphics processors. Once constructed, these data structures can be used to implement a host of algorithms useful in creating complex rendering effects in real time. We present a straightforward way to create these linked lists using generic atomic operations available in APIs such as OpenGL 4.0 and DirectX 11. We also describe several possible applications of our algorithm. One example uses per‐pixel linked lists for order‐independent transparency; as a consequence, we are able to directly implement fully programmable blending, which frees developers from the restrictions imposed by current graphics APIs. The second uses linked lists to implement real‐time indirect shadows.

This course provides an introduction to parallel-programming architectures and environments for interactive graphics and demonstrates how to combine traditional rendering API with advanced parallel computation.

We present a novel algorithm to efficiently render accurate reflections on programmable graphics hardware. Our algorithm overcomes problems that commonly occur in environment mapping such as the lack of motion parallax and inaccuracies when objects are close to the reflectors. In place of a 2D environment map, which only represents points infinitely far away from the reflector, we use six 4D light field slabs to represent the surrounding scene. Each reflected ray is rendered by indexing into these precaptured environment light fields. We are able to render accurate reflections with motion parallax at interactive frame rates independent of the reflector geometry and the scene complexity. Furthermore, we can move the reflectors within a constrained region of space and guarantee that the environment light field provides the necessary rays. We benefit from the programmability of existing graphics hardware to efficiently compute the reflected rays and transform them into the appropriate light field index. We also take advantage of the large texture memories and memory bandwidth available in today's graphics card to store and query hardware-compressed light fields.