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A Tiny Example Based Procedural Model for Real-Time Glinty Appearance Rendering

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  • Special Section of CVM 2024
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Abstract

The glinty details from complex microstructures significantly enhance rendering realism. However, the previous methods use high-resolution normal maps to define each micro-geometry, which requires huge memory overhead. This paper observes that many self-similarity materials have independent structural characteristics, which we define as tiny example microstructures. We propose a procedural model to represent microstructures implicitly by performing spatial transformations and spatial distribution on tiny examples. Furthermore, we precompute normal distribution functions (NDFs) by 4D Gaussians for tiny examples and store them in multi-scale NDF maps. Combined with a tiny example based NDF evaluation method, complex glinty surfaces can be rendered simply by texture sampling. The experimental results show that our tiny example based the microstructure rendering method is GPU-friendly, successfully reproducing high-frequency reflection features of different microstructures in real time with low memory and computational overhead.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Software, Shandong University, Jinan, 250101, China

    You-Xin Xing  (邢佑鑫), Yan-Ning Xu  (徐延宁) & Lu Wang  (王 璐)

  2. NetEase (Hangzhou) Network Co., Ltd, Hangzhou, 310052, China

    Hao-Wen Tan  (谭皓文)

Authors
  1. You-Xin Xing  (邢佑鑫)
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  2. Hao-Wen Tan  (谭皓文)
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  3. Yan-Ning Xu  (徐延宁)
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  4. Lu Wang  (王 璐)
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Yan-Ning Xu  (徐延宁) or Lu Wang  (王 璐).

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Conflict of Interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant No. 2022YFB3303203 and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 62272275.

Yan-Ning Xu is responsible for algorithm design and participated in paper writing. Lu Wang is responsible for the overall design and guidance of the paper, and participated in algorithmic optimization.

You-Xin Xing received his B.S. degree in digital media technology from the College of Computer Science and Engineering, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, in 2020. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Software, Shandong University, Jinan. His research interests include real-time rendering, material appearance modeling, and game development.

Hao-Wen Tan received his M.S. degree in software engineering from the School of Software, Shandong University, Jinan, in 2023. He is a senior game engine developer at NetEase (Hangzhou) Network Co., Ltd, Hangzhou. His research interest is mainly in real-time rendering.

Yan-Ning Xu received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University, Jinan, in 2006. He is an associate professor at the School of Software, Shandong University, Jinan. His research interests are computer-aided design (CAD), graphics, virtual reality, etc.

Lu Wang received her Ph.D. degree in computer science and technology from the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University, Jinan, in 2009. She is a professor at the School of Software, Shandong University, Jinan. Her research interests include photorealistic rendering, real-time rendering, material appearance modeling, and high-performance rendering.

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Xing, YX., Tan, HW., Xu, YN. et al. A Tiny Example Based Procedural Model for Real-Time Glinty Appearance Rendering. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 39, 771–784 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-024-4123-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-024-4123-3

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