Open Access

Generating and visualizing large areas of vegetation that look natural makes terrain surfaces much more realistic. However, this is a challenging field in computer graphics, because ecological systems are complex and visually appealing plant models are geometrically detailed. This work presents Silva (System for the Instantiation of Large Vegetated Areas), a system to generate and visualize large vegetated areas based on the ecological surrounding. Silva generates vegetation on Wang-tiles with associated reusable distributions enabling multi-level instantiation. This paper presents a method to generate Poisson Disc Distributions (PDDs) with variable radii on Wang-tile sets (without a global optimization) that is able to generate seamless tilings. Because Silva has a freely configurable generation pipeline and can consider plant neighborhoods it is able to incorporate arbitrary abiotic and biotic components during generation. Based on multi-levelinstancing and nested kd-trees, the distributions on the Wang-tiles allow their acceleration structures to be reused during visualization. This enables Silva to visualize large vegetated areas of several hundred square kilometers with low render times and a small memory footprint.

We present a system that combines voxel and polygonal representations into a single octree acceleration structure that can be used for ray tracing. Voxels are well-suited to create good level-of-detail for high-frequency models where polygonal simplifications usually fail due to the complex structure of the model. However, polygonal descriptions provide the higher visual fidelity. In addition, voxel representations often oversample the geometric domain especially for large triangles, whereas a few polygons can be tested for intersection more quickly.

Rendering techniques for design evaluation and review or for visualizing large volume data often use computationally expensive ray-based methods. Due to the number of pixels and the amount of data, these methods often do not achieve interactive frame rates. A view direction based rendering technique renders the users central field of view in high quality whereas the surrounding is rendered with a level of detail approach depending on the distance to the users central field of view thus giving the opportunity to increase rendering efficiency. We propose a prototype implementation and evaluation of a focus-based rendering technique based on a hybrid ray tracing/sparse voxel octree rendering approach.

Human beings spend much time under the influence of artificial lighting. Often, it is beneficial to adapt lighting to the task, as well as the user’s mental and physical constitution and well-being. This formulates new requirements for lighting - human-centric lighting - and drives a need for new light control methods in interior spaces. In this paper we present a holistic system that provides a novel approach to human-centric lighting by introducing simulation methods into interactive light control, to adapt the lighting based on the user's needs. We look at a simulation and evaluation platform that uses interactive stochastic spectral rendering methods to simulate light sources, allowing for their interactive adjustment and adaption.

In recent years, a variety of methods have been introduced to exploit the decrease in visual acuity of peripheral vision, known as foveated rendering. As more and more computationally involved shading is requested and display resolutions increase, maintaining low latencies is challenging when rendering in a virtual reality context. Here, foveated rendering is a promising approach for reducing the number of shaded samples. However, besides the reduction of the visual acuity, the eye is an optical system, filtering radiance through lenses. The lenses create depth-of-field (DoF) effects when accommodated to objects at varying distances. The central idea of this article is to exploit these effects as a filtering method to conceal rendering artifacts. To showcase the potential of such filters, we present a foveated rendering system, tightly integrated with a gaze-contingent DoF filter. Besides presenting benchmarks of the DoF and rendering pipeline, we carried out a perceptual study, showing that rendering quality is rated almost on par with full rendering when using DoF in our foveated mode, while shaded samples are reduced by more than 69%.

Modern Monte-Carlo-based rendering systems still suffer from the computational complexity involved in the generation of noise-free images, making it challenging to synthesize interactive previews. We present a framework suited for rendering such previews of static scenes using a caching technique that builds upon a linkless octree. Our approach allows for memory-efficient storage and constant-time lookup to cache diffuse illumination at multiple hitpoints along the traced paths. Non-diffuse surfaces are dealt with in a hybrid way in order to reconstruct view-dependent illumination while maintaining interactive frame rates. By evaluating the visual fidelity against ground truth sequences and by benchmarking, we show that our approach compares well to low-noise path traced results, but with a greatly reduced computational complexity allowing for interactive frame rates. This way, our caching technique provides a useful tool for global illumination previews and multi-view rendering.

Computer graphics research strives to synthesize images of a high visual realism that are indistinguishable from real visual experiences. While modern image synthesis approaches enable to create digital images of astonishing complexity and beauty, processing resources remain a limiting factor. Here, rendering efficiency is a central challenge involving a trade-off between visual fidelity and interactivity. For that reason, there is still a fundamental difference between the perception of the physical world and computer-generated imagery. At the same time, advances in display technologies drive the development of novel display devices. The dynamic range, the pixel densities, and refresh rates are constantly increasing. Display systems enable a larger visual field to be addressed by covering a wider field-of-view, due to either their size or in the form of head-mounted devices. Currently, research prototypes are ranging from stereo and multi-view systems, head-mounted devices with adaptable lenses, up to retinal projection, and lightfield/holographic displays. Computer graphics has to keep step with, as driving these devices presents us with immense challenges, most of which are currently unsolved. Fortunately, the human visual system has certain limitations, which means that providing the highest possible visual quality is not always necessary. Visual input passes through the eye’s optics, is filtered, and is processed at higher level structures in the brain. Knowledge of these processes helps to design novel rendering approaches that allow the creation of images at a higher quality and within a reduced time-frame. This thesis presents the state-of-the-art research and models that exploit the limitations of perception in order to increase visual quality but also to reduce workload alike - a concept we call perception-driven rendering. This research results in several practical rendering approaches that allow some of the fundamental challenges of computer graphics to be tackled. By using different tracking hardware, display systems, and head-mounted devices, we show the potential of each of the presented systems. The capturing of specific processes of the human visual system can be improved by combining multiple measurements using machine learning techniques. Different sampling, filtering, and reconstruction techniques aid the visual quality of the synthesized images. An in-depth evaluation of the presented systems including benchmarks, comparative examination with image metrics as well as user studies and experiments demonstrated that the methods introduced are visually superior or on the same qualitative level as ground truth, whilst having a significantly reduced computational complexity.

In order to achieve the highest possible performance, the ray traversal and intersection routines at the core of every high-performance ray tracer are usually hand-coded, heavily optimized, and implemented separately for each hardware platform—even though they share most of their algorithmic core. The results are implementations that heavily mix algorithmic aspects with hardware and implementation details, making the code non-portable and difficult to change and maintain. In this paper, we present a new approach that offers the ability to define in a functional language a set of conceptual, high-level language abstractions that are optimized away by a special compiler in order to maximize performance. Using this abstraction mechanism we separate a generic ray traversal and intersection algorithm from its low-level aspects that are specific to the target hardware. We demonstrate that our code is not only significantly more flexible, simpler to write, and more concise but also that the compiled results perform as well as state-of-the-art implementations on any of the tested CPU and GPU platforms.

This work presents the analysis of data recorded by an eye tracking device in the course of evaluating a foveated rendering approach for head-mounted displays (HMDs). Foveated rendering methods adapt the image synthesis process to the user’s gaze and exploiting the human visual system’s limitations to increase rendering performance. Especially, foveated rendering has great potential when certain requirements have to be fulfilled, like low-latency rendering to cope with high display refresh rates. This is crucial for virtual reality (VR), as a high level of immersion, which can only be achieved with high rendering performance and also helps to reduce nausea, is an important factor in this field. We put things in context by first providing basic information about our rendering system, followed by a description of the user study and the collected data. This data stems from fixation tasks that subjects had to perform while being shown fly-through sequences of virtual scenes on an HMD. These fixation tasks consisted of a combination of various scenes and fixation modes. Besides static fixation targets, moving tar- gets on randomized paths as well as a free focus mode were tested. Using this data, we estimate the precision of the utilized eye tracker and analyze the participants’ accuracy in focusing the displayed fixation targets. Here, we also take a look at eccentricity-dependent quality ratings. Comparing this information with the users’ quality ratings given for the displayed sequences then reveals an interesting connection between fixation modes, fixation accuracy and quality ratings.