Read for Tues 9/30

We'll be looking at the evolution of PC graphics chips, concentrating on the latest high performance designs. Please read

Lindholm, et al., NVIDIA Tesla: A Unified Graphics and Computing Architecture, IEEE Micro, March/April 2008 (Vol. 28, No. 2) pp. 39-55
http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MM.2008.31

and

Seiler, et al., Larrabee: a many-core x86 architecture for visual computing, SIGGRAOH 2008
http://doi.acm.org.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/10.1145/1399504.1360617

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You may be interested in a quick glance at

Myer and Sutherland, On the design of display processors, CACM, June 1968
http://doi.acm.org.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/10.1145/363347.363368

Readings for Thursday 9/25

These are the first paper presentations.

1) Henrik Wann Jensen and Per H. Christensen, Efficient Simulation of Light Transport in Scenes with Participating Media using Photon Maps, SIGGRAPH'98

and

2) Robert Geist, Karl Rasche, James Westall and Robert Schalkoff, "Lattice-Boltzmann Lighting", Proc. Eurographics Symposium on Rendering, June, 2004

with background from Jos Stam, "Multiple scattering as a diffusion process", Eurographics Rendering Workshop, 1995

Paper for Tuesday 9/23

Molnar, Cox, Ellsworth, and Fuchs. "A Sorting Classification of Parallel Rendering, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 14(4), July 1994, 23-32.

Local copy at
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~lastra/Courses/COMP290_F2005/Notes/Molnar-Sorting-CGA94.pdf

OBJ loader

Micah wrote a loader for obj files, and some documentation. He says

I've placed the obj loader here:
http://kixor.net/dev/objloader/

It is written in C with a C++ wrapper for easy OO use. I've also included a sample Cornell box scene. I have tested the parser with a test tool and with my raytracer and I think it's all ready if other people want to use it.

Selected Paper Presentation Topics

I've been getting email with some people's choices, so I created a web page on Blackboard (see the documents section) to list them.

I'll try to keep that list current as I hear from you, and add presentation dates also.

Quiz Thursday 9/18

As I mentioned in class, I plan to give a quiz (closed book) during the last 20-30 minutes of class on Thursday. It'll cover basic radiometry (power, irradiance, radiosity, radiance), so you'll need to memorize about 1/2 dozen formulas.

The idea is to make sure you learn the very basic units, and their relationships.

Choose Paper by Friday (5PM)

I've posted a few suggestions. There are other interesting areas in which to look, including point-based rendering, and natural phenomena. If you're interested in a particular area but don't know how to decide on a paper, let's meet and discuss it.

Presentation Topics IV, NPR

The conference on this topic is NPAR (http://www.npar.org/). Here are a few papers representing topics such as pen & ink, and painterly rendering.

Real-Time Hatching by Emil Praun, Matthew Webb, Adam Finkelstein, Hugues Hoppe, SIGGRAPH 2001.

Drawing Strokes Directly on 3D Models by Robert D. Kalnins et. al. from SIGGRAPH 2002.

M.C. Sousa, K. Foster, B. Wyvill, and F. Samavati. Precise ink drawing of 3D models. Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. of EuroGraphics ’03), 2003.

Computer-Generated Pen-and-Ink Illustration, Winkenbach and Salesin, SIGGRAPH 94

Interactive Pen-and-Ink Illustration, Salisbury, et al., SIGGRAPH 94

Painterly Rendering for Animation, Meier, SIGGRAPH 96

Computer-Generated Watercolor, Cassidy Curtis, Sean Anderson, Josh Seims, Kurt Fleischer, David Salesin , SIGGRAPH 97

Litwinowicz. Processing images and video for an impressionist effect. SIGGRAPH 97,

Markosian, et al., Real-time nonphotorealistic rendering. SIGGRAPH 97

Hertzmann and Perlin. Painterly rendering for video and interaction. In Proc. of NPAR, 2000

A survey of techniques is on line at http://www.red3d.com/cwr/npr/ (last updated in 2003, but still seems useful).

Presentation Topics III, HDR and Tone Mapping

This is a good topic for multiple presentations clustered together. I can lecture on hdr representations and ways to create hdr images. We could then proceed with a few presentations of tone mapping and HDR display papers.

High-dynamic range formats were developed for use in photorealistic rendering, notably Greg Ward's Radiance package. There was also work on capture of HDR imagery in the computer vision field.

The paper

Paul E. Debevec and Jitendra Malik. Recovering High Dynamic Range Radiance Maps from Photographs, SIGGRAPH 97.

described how to create HDR images from a series of photographs. This was followed by

Paul E. Debevec. Rendering Synthetic Objects into Real Scenes: Bridging Traditional and Image-Based Graphics with Global Illumination and High Dynamic Range Photography, SIGGRAPH 98.

that introduced the concept of lighting CG scenes with data from real-world photographs.

Tone Mapping

Edge-preserving decompositions for multi-scale tone and detail manipulation, Zeev Farbman, Raanan Fattal, Dani Lischinski, Richard Szeliski, SIGGRAPH 2008 (http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~danix/epd/)

Display Adaptive Tone Mapping, Rafal Mantiuk, Scott Daly, Louis Kerofsky, SIGGRAPH 2008 (http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/resources/hdr/datmo/)

A Perceptual Framework for Contrast Processing of High Dynamic Range Images, R. Mantiuk, K. Myszkowski, and H.-P. Seidel, ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 2006

Compressing and companding high dynamic range images with subband architectures, Yuanzhen Li, Lavanya Sharan, Edward H. Adelson, SIGGRAPH 2005.

Adaptive Logarithmic Mapping for Displaying High Contrast Scenes, F. Drago, K. Myszkowski, T. Annen, and N. Chiba, Eurographics 2003

Time-Dependent Visual Adaptation for Realistic Image Display, S.N. Pattanaik, J. Tumblin, H. Yee, and D.P. Greenberg, SIGGRAPH 2000

Dynamic Range Reduction Inspired by Photoreceptor Physiology, E. Reinhard and K. Devlin, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2004

This trio of papers was presented together at SIGGRAPH 2002.

Photographic Tone Reproduction for Digital Images, Erik Reinhard, Michael Stark, Peter Shirley, Jim Ferwerda, SIGGRAPH 2002.

Raanan Fattal, Dani Lischinski, Michael Werman, Gradient Domain High Dynamic Range Compression, SIGGRAPH 2002.

Frédo Durand, Julie Dorsey, Fast Bilateral Filtering for the Display of High Dynamic Range Images, SIGGRAPH 2002. (See http://people.csail.mit.edu/sparis/bf/ for a newer, faster approach)

Software that can be used to compare different tone mapping algorithms is available at http://pfstools.sourceforge.net/.

Display

If you are interested in display devices, you could present

Seetzen, Heidrich, Stuerzlinger, Ward, Whitehead, Trentacoste, Ghosh, Vorozcovs: High Dynamic Range Display Systems, Siggraph 2004.

Misc

Ledda, et al, Evaluation of Tone Mapping Operators using a High Dynamic Range Display, SIGGRAPH 2005. This one is on comparisons of techniques.

Readings for Thursday 9/11

Henrik Wann Jensen, Global Illumination using Photon Maps, Eurographics Rendering Workshop 1996 (http://graphics.stanford.edu/~henrik/papers/ewr7/ewr7.html). Jensen's book has a more detailed treatment.

Eric Veach and Leonidas J. Guibas Metropolis Light Transport SIGGRAPH 97 (http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/258734.258775).

Presentation Topics for 9/23 and 9/25

I'd like to get four of you to present that week (if more are interested, we can go on the following week). We should set up rehearsals late next week. Here are some suggestions.

1. A day or more on light transport

a. This is a good follow-on to Photon Mapping: Henrik Wann Jensen and Per H. Christensen, Efficient Simulation of Light Transport in Scenes with Participating Media using Photon Maps, SIGGRAPH'98

b. Precomputed light transport. The paper that spawned a whole bunch of follow-up work is: Precomputed Radiance Transfer for Real-Time Rendering in Dynamic, Low-Frequency Lighting Environments, Peter-Pike Sloan, Jan Kautz, and John Snyder, SIGGRAPH 2002. Many papers have extended the idea to more types of lighting and a wider range of materials. Also, other sets of basis functions.

c. Use of point light sources to simulate globillum and other illumination. This was pioneered by Alexander Keller in the paper Instant Radiosity, SIGGRAPH 97. A recent paper that may be a good one to present is Walter, et al, Lightcuts: A Scalable Approach to Illumination, SIGGRAPH 2005.

d. Ambient occlusion. A possible paper is "Visibility & Games: Ambient Occlusion Fields", Janne Kontkanen, Samuli Laine, Proceedings of the 2005 symposium on Interactive 3D graphics.

2. Fast ray tracing. It'd be good to get talks on CPU and GPU methods. Frameless rendering is also very interesting.

a. On CPUs, this was pioneered by folks at Utah with a ray tracer that ran on a parallel computer from SGI. A more accessible approach on a cluster of PCs was presented in a series of papers by Ingo Wald from Saarbrucken around 2001 or so (see http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/Publications/index.html).

There are many newer papers focusing on CPU implementations. A good place to look is the Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing (2006-2008). For example, one paper that looks interesting is Large Ray Packets for Real-time Whitted Ray Tracing
Whitted Ray Tracing by Overbeck, et al. presented at the Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing 2008.

b. Ray tracing on GPUs. There have recently been some impressive demos on ATI and NVIDIA cards. A recent paper on this is Horn, et al., Interactive k-D Tree GPU Raytracing, I3D 2007.

c. Frameless rendering is a technique first presented in Gary Bishop, Henry Fuchs, Leonard McMillan and Ellen Scher Zagier, Frameless rendering: double buffering considered harmful, SIGGRAPH 94. The idea is that you don't need to render every pixel in each frame, just a subset, perhaps chosen randomly and in a way where you get to all pixels in some rotation. A good paper to present may be Adaptive Frameless Rendering. Abhinav Dayal, Cliff Woolley, Ben Watson, and David Luebke, Proceedings of the 2005 Eurographics Symposium on Rendering, Konstanz, Germany (June 2005).

Assignments 2 & 3 Posted

To the Blackboard site.

Presentation Topics II, Rendering Effects

Some presentations on photorealistic rendering and global illumination algorithms would be good.

Examples:

Henrik Wann Jensen Steve Marschner Marc Levoy Pat Hanrahan, A Practical Model for Subsurface Light Transport, SIGGRAPH 2001

J. Krüger, K. Bürger, R. Westermann, Interactive Screen-Space Accurate Photon Tracing on GPUs, Proceedings EGSR 2006

Henrik Wann Jensen and Per H. Christensen, Efficient Simulation of Light Transport in Scenes with Participating Media using Photon Maps, SIGGRAPH'98

Readings for Tuesday 9/9

A Progressive Refinement Approach to Fast Radiosity Image Generation by Michael F. Cohen, Shenchang Eric Chen, John R. Wallace, Donald P. Greenberg. Computer Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 88). 22 (4). pp. 75-84. 1988.

This material (and much more) is covered in greater detail in Cohen and Wallace, Radiosity and Realistic Image Synthesis, Academic Press, 1993. I recommend that you read this book if you are serious about learning global illumination methods.

Getting email for blog postings

If you want to try this, please send a blank email to

subscribe-comp870-blog at listserv.unc.edu

(replace the 'at' with @, of course) Hopefully you'll get a reply back from the listserv confirming your subscription. Please let me know if something goes wrong.