Kaiserslautern - Fachbereich Informatik
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The photon map provides a powerful tool for approximating the irradiance in global illumination computations independent from geometry. By presenting new importance sampling techniques, we dramatically improve the memory footprint of the photon map, simplify the caustic generation, and allow for a much faster sampling of direct illumination in complicated models as they arise in a production environment.
In this paper we show how Metropolis Light Transport can be extended both in the underlying theoretical framework and the algorithmic implementation to incorporate volumetric scattering.
We present a generalization of the path integral formulation thathandles anisotropic scattering in non-homogeneous media. Based on this framework we introduce a new mutation strategy that is
specifically designed for participating media. It exploits the locality of light propagation by perturbing certain interaction points within the medium. To efficiently sample inhomogeneous media a new ray marching method has been developed that avoids aliasing artefacts and is significantly faster than stratified sampling. The resulting global illumination algorithm provides a physically correct simulation of light transport in the presence of participating media that includes effects such as volume caustics and multiple volume scattering. It is not restricted to certain classes of geometry and scattering models and has minimal memory requirements. Furthermore, it is unbiased and robust, in the sense that it produces satisfactory results for a wide range of input scenes and lighting situations within acceptable time bounds. In particular, we found that it is weil suited for complex scenes with many light sources.
The quality of freeform surfaces is one of the major topics of CAD/CAM. Aesthetic and technical demands require the construction of high quality surfaces with strong shape conditions. Quality diminishing properties like dents or flat points have to be eliminated while approximation conditions must hold at the same time. Our approach combines quality and approximation criteria to a nonlinear multicriteria optimization problem and achieves an automatic approximation and fitting process.
For most applications the used transport service providers are predetermined during the development of the application. This makes it difficult to consider the application communication requirements and to exploit specific features of the network technology. Specialized protocols that are more efficient and offer a qualitative improved service are typically not supported by most applications because they are not commonly available. In this paper we propose a concept for the realization of protocol independent transport services. Only a transport service is predetermined during the development of the application and an appropriate transport service provider is dynamically selected at run time. This enables to exploit specialized protocols if possible, but standard protocols could still be used if necessary. The main focus of this paper is how a transport service could provide a new transport service provider transparently to existing applications. A prototype is presented that maps TCP/IP based applications to an ATM specific transport service provider which offers a reliable and unreliable transport service like TCP/IP.