Modular flux transfer
Abstract
The highest fidelity images to date of complex materials like cloth use extremely high-resolution volumetric models. However, rendering such complex volumetric media is expensive, with brute-force path tracing often the only viable solution. Fortunately, common volumetric materials (fabrics, finished wood, synthesized solid textures) are structured, with repeated patterns approximated by tiling a small number of exemplar blocks. In this paper, we introduce a precomputation-based rendering approach for such volumetric media with repeated structures based on a modular transfer formulation. We model each exemplar block as a voxel grid and precompute voxel-to-voxel, patch-to-patch, and patch-to-voxel flux transfer matrices. At render time, when blocks are tiled to produce a high-resolution volume, we accurately compute low-order scattering, with modular flux transfer used to approximate higher-order scattering. We achieve speedups of up to 12× over path tracing on extremely complex volumes, with minimal loss of quality. In addition, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms photon mapping on these materials.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Jul 21, 2013
- Source ID
- 10.1145/2461912.2461938
Entities
People
- Kavita Bala
- Miloš Hašan
- Ravi Ramamoorthi
- Shuang G. Zhao
Organizations
- Adobe
- Cornell University
- Intel Corporation
- National Science Foundation
- Nvidia
- Office of Naval Research
- University of California, Berkeley
- autodesk.com