Detailed Surfaces for Interactive Rendering

Humans perceive their surroundings by the light that is reflected from surfaces. In particular, it is the fine detail observed on surfaces that provides clues about material properties like roughness, texture, temperature, etc. Similarly, in interactive computer graphics applications, the complexity of surface renderings is one of the first things that occur to an observer when judging how good or realistic the application looks. One key issue is to provide the same amount of visual detail as a real surface. This plays an important role in a number of interactive applications where the viewpoint and illumination change rapidly, including visual impact analysis, cultural heritage, design reviews, architecture and urban planning, driving and traffic simulation, engineering and computer games to name but a few. The aim of the Desiree project is to develop algorithms and data structures to efficiently acquire, store and display geometrically complex surfaces for such real-time applications. Adding surface detail has been a research topic since the early days of computer graphics, including texture mapping, displacement mapping and slice-based representations. However, none of these approaches can directly be used for the aforementioned applications due to insufficient image quality, non-interactivity or too high memory requirements. In addition, no tools are available to convert the complex models created by 3D artists into representations useful for fast and high-quality display. In Desiree, the main strategy will be to treat the rough object shape and the fine-scale details separately. We will research efficient data structures and algorithms that consider all aspects of this strategy, starting from the decomposition of a complex mesh into low- and high-detail components, efficient representations for the high-detail components, different mappings from the high-detail to the low-detail representation, and high-quality rendering in real time, including anti-aliasing issues and realistic illumination. For rendering, we will exploit recent programmable graphics hardware to develop output-sensitive display algorithms based on ray casting. We believe that this concept will allow us to achieve both, high image quality and real-time frame rates at the same time.