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Interactive volume caustics in single-scattering media

Published: 19 February 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Volume caustics are intricate illumination patterns formed by light first interacting with a specular surface and subsequently being scattered inside a participating medium. Although this phenomenon can be simulated by existing techniques, image synthesis is usually non-trivial and time-consuming.
Motivated by interactive applications, we propose a novel volume caustics rendering method for single-scattering participating media. Our method is based on the observation that line rendering of illumination rays into the screen buffer establishes a direct light path between the viewer and the light source. This connection is introduced via a single scattering event for every pixel affected by the line primitive. Since the GPU is a parallel processor, the radiance contributions of these light paths to each of the pixels can be computed and accumulated independently. The implementation of our method is straightforward and we show that it can be seamlessly integrated with existing methods for rendering participating media.
We achieve high-quality results at real-time frame rates for large and dynamic scenes containing homogeneous participating media. For inhomogeneous media, our method achieves interactive performance that is close to real-time. Our method is based on a simplified physical model and can thus be used for generating physically plausible previews of expensive lighting simulations quickly.

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cover image ACM Conferences
I3D '10: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGGRAPH symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games
February 2010
201 pages
ISBN:9781605589398
DOI:10.1145/1730804
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 19 February 2010

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Author Tags

  1. ray marching
  2. real-time rendering
  3. volume caustics

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  • Research-article

Funding Sources

  • Young Scientific Researcher Funding of Beijing University of Chemical Technology, China

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I3D '10
Sponsor:
I3D '10: Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games
February 19 - 21, 2010
D.C., Washington

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Overall Acceptance Rate 148 of 485 submissions, 31%

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  • (2019)Real-Time Mixed Reality Rendering for Underwater 360° Videos2019 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR)10.1109/ISMAR.2019.00-24(74-82)Online publication date: Oct-2019
  • (2018)Point-Based Rendering for Homogeneous Participating Media with Refractive BoundariesIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2017.276852524:10(2743-2757)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2018
  • (2018)Interactive Dynamic Volume Illumination with Refraction and CausticsIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2017.274443824:1(984-993)Online publication date: Jan-2018
  • (2016)Fog effect for photography using stereo visionThe Visual Computer: International Journal of Computer Graphics10.5555/2893030.289306632:1(99-109)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2016
  • (2015)Accurate Computation of Single Scattering in Participating Media with Refractive BoundariesComputer Graphics Forum10.1111/cgf.1251734:6(48-59)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2015
  • (2015)Fog effect for photography using stereo visionThe Visual Computer10.1007/s00371-014-1058-732:1(99-109)Online publication date: 20-Jan-2015
  • (2013)Adaptive sampling approach for volumetric shadows in dynamic scenesIET Image Processing10.1049/iet-ipr.2013.00677:8(762-767)Online publication date: Nov-2013
  • (2012)State of the art in photon density estimationACM SIGGRAPH 2012 Courses10.1145/2343483.2343489(1-469)Online publication date: 5-Aug-2012
  • (2012)The State of the Art in Interactive Global IlluminationComputer Graphics Forum10.1111/j.1467-8659.2012.02093.x31:1(160-188)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2012
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