Master2R 2013-2014 project:
"Modeling the emerging effects of sub-voxel data
for scalable realistic realtime rendering of GigaVoxels scenes"

Advisor

Fabrice NEYRET   -   Maverick team, LJK, at INRIA-Montbonnot

Context

Nowadays 3D applications such as games and movies production rely on highly detailed objects settling in large scenes. To avoid the costly rendering of distant objects whose many details fall in the same pixels - as well as too avoid aliasing artifacts – distant objects are simplified into « levels of details » meshes. But micro-details (e.g. shining ice crystal) can influence the whole pixel value, and a rough or corrugated geometry still reflects differently even when its shape seems flat. Similarly, a distant grid looks like a semi-transparent panel : even if smaller than pixels bars cannot be simply erased. This illustrates that the sub-pixel information can induce emerging effects which should be explicitly expressed into a shader function rather than being totally suppressed.
Our team has published many researches on appearance filtering. Some aimed at deep filtering of well-characterized objects (such as E.Bruneton work on ocean waves or trees), and some aimed at less deep filtering of more general surfaces (E.Heitz work).
Our team also developed the voxel-based scalable scene representation GigaVoxels based on the fact that appearance filtering is well-posed using voxels contrary to meshes. Still, it is not sufficient to average sub-voxel data – e.g., density - to obtain the averaged appearance of a voxel.

Description of the subject

This subject aims at addressing the problem above, by modeling a shadable representation keeping enough of the subscale meaningful information. At the scale of a pixel, appearance consists of colors, opacity, polish and roughness (through highlights and shadowed small valleys). All these can varies with view and light direction (as for the distant grid and the corrugated surface mentioned above). These global attributes may result from different values at subpixel scales such as colored grains, rough geometry, thin openwork. Similarly, they must be implicitly accounted for in coarser pixels appearance. In order to be scalable through many scales, we need a closed representation, i.e., whose averaging can be encoded using itself. In particular, some notions like “normals” are not scalable but normal distributions – e.g. lobes – are, and more generally, histograms – or there statistical momentums. Notions like « density » or « opacity » loose too much key-information : for 2 voxels aligned with the eye, the total opacity should not be the same whether their content is consistently gathered on voxel-left, or left for first voxel and right for the second, or scattered within each. So to voxelize a solid object with correct appearance on the silhouette (partly-filled voxels) we need a better but compact representation of the occlusion in voxels. Another common case of correlated data are sheets with 2 different colored faces: seeing one is not seeing the other, so these colors - but also their lighting - should not be mixed whatever the pixel coarseness.
Several of the issues above have been addressed in our previous work (see ref section) for surfaces. In this project we target volumes of voxels, in order to complete the scalability (with high quality) of the voxel representation. This will fully allows real-time high quality walk-through very huge and detailed scenes: let's break the complexity wall !


Prerequisites

References