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A Fast Ambient Occlusion Method for Real-Time Plant Rendering

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Abstract

Global illumination effects are crucial for virtual plant rendering. Whereas real-time global illumination rendering of plants is impractical, ambient occlusion is an efficient alternative approximation. A tree model with millions of triangles is common, and the triangles can be considered as randomly distributed. The existing ambient occlusion methods fail to apply on such a type of object. In this paper, we present a new ambient occlusion method dedicated to real time plant rendering with limited user interaction. This method is a three-step ambient occlusion calculation framework which is suitable for a huge number of geometry objects distributed randomly in space. The complexity of the proposed algorithm is O(n), compared to the conventional methods with complexities of O(n 2). Furthermore, parameters in this method can be easily adjusted to achieve flexible ambient occlusion effects. With this ambient occlusion calculation method, we can manipulate plant models with millions of organs, as well as geometry objects with large number of randomly distributed components with affordable time, and with perceptual quality comparable to the previous ambient occlusion methods.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LIAMA/NLPR, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100080, China

    Jun Teng & Bao-Gang Hu

  2. INRIA-Futurs, DigiPlante Team, CIRAD AMAP, Montpellier, France

    Marc Jaeger

Authors
  1. Jun Teng
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  2. Marc Jaeger
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  3. Bao-Gang Hu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jun Teng.

Additional information

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 60073007 and 60473110), National High Technology Development 863 Program of China (Grant No. 2006AA01Z301), LIAMA, and French National Research Agency (Grant No. NATSIM ANR-05-MMSA-45).

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Teng, J., Jaeger, M. & Hu, BG. A Fast Ambient Occlusion Method for Real-Time Plant Rendering. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 22, 859–866 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-007-9104-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-007-9104-9

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