54.73 Computergraphik
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- Bachelor Thesis (11)
- Master's Thesis (6)
- Doctoral Thesis (2)
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- Computervisualistik (5)
- Computergrafik (4)
- Line Space (4)
- Raytracing (3)
- Augmented Reality (2)
- Datenstruktur (2)
- Global Illumination (2)
- Linespace (2)
- Path Tracing (2)
- Realistische Computergrafik (2)
Institute
In this thesis the possibilities for real-time visualization of OpenVDB
files are investigated. The basics of OpenVDB, its possibilities, as well
as NanoVDB and its GPU port, were studied. A system was developed
using PNanoVDB, the graphics API port of OpenVDB. Techniques were
explored to improve and accelerate a single ray approach of ray tracing.
To prove real-time capability, two single scattering approaches were
also implemented. One of these was selected, further investigated and
optimized to achieve interactive real-time rendering.
It is important to give artists immediate feedback on their adjustments, as
well as the possibility to change all parameters to ensure a user friendly
creation process.
In addition to the optical rendering, corresponding benchmarks were
collected to compare different improvement approaches and to prove
their relevance. Attention was paid to the rendering times and memory
consumption on the GPU to ensure optimal use. A special focus, when
rendering OpenVDB files, was put on the integrability and extensibility of
the program to allow easy integration into an existing real-time renderer
like U-Render.
Point Rendering
(2021)
In this thesis different methods for rendering point data are shown and compared with each other. The methods can be divided into two categories. For one visual methods are introduced that strictly deal with the displaying of point primitves. The main problem here lies in the depiction of surfaces since point data, unlike traditional triangle meshes, doesn't contain any connectivity information. On the other hand data strucutres are shown that enable real-time rendering of large point clouds. Point clouds often contain large amounts of data since they are mostly generated through 3D scanning processes such as laser scanning and photogrammetry.
Ray tracing acceleration through dedicated data structures has long been an important topic in computer graphics. In general, two different approaches are proposed: spatial and directional acceleration structures. The thesis at hand presents an innovative combined approach of these two areas, which enables a further acceleration of the tracing process of rays. State-of-the-art spatial data structures are used as base structures and enhanced by precomputed directional visibility information based on a sophisticated abstraction concept of shafts within an original structure, the Line Space.
In the course of the work, novel approaches for the precomputed visibility information are proposed: a binary value that indicates whether a shaft is empty or non-empty as well as a single candidate approximating the actual surface as a representative candidate. It is shown how the binary value is used in a simple but effective empty space skipping technique, which allows a performance gain in ray tracing of up to 40% compared to the pure base data structure, regardless of the spatial structure that is actually used. In addition, it is shown that this binary visibility information provides a fast technique for calculating soft shadows and ambient occlusion based on blocker approximations. Although the results contain a certain inaccuracy error, which is also presented and discussed, it is shown that a further tracing acceleration of up to 300% compared to the base structure is achieved. As an extension of this approach, the representative candidate precomputation is demonstrated, which is used to accelerate the indirect lighting computation, resulting in a significant performance gain at the expense of image errors. Finally, techniques based on two-stage structures and a usage heuristic are proposed and evaluated. These reduce memory consumption and approximation errors while maintaining the performance gain and also enabling further possibilities with object instancing and rigid transformations.
All performance and memory values as well as the approximation errors are measured, presented and discussed. Overall, the Line Space is shown to result in a considerate improvement in ray tracing performance at the cost of higher memory consumption and possible approximation errors. The presented findings thus demonstrate the capability of the combined approach and enable further possibilities for future work.
The Material Point Method (MPM) has proven to be a very capable simulation method in computer graphics that is able to model materials that were previously very challenging to animate [1, 2]. Apart from simulating singular materials, the simulation of multiple materials that interact with each other introduces new challenges. This is the focus of this thesis. It will be shown that the self-collision capabilities of the MPM can naturally handle multiple materials interacting in the same scene on a collision basis, even if the materials use distinct constitutive models. This is then extended by porous interaction of materials as in[3], which also integrates easily with MPM.It will furthermore be shown that regular single-grid MPM can be viewed as a subset of this multi-grid approach, meaning that its behavior can also be achieved if multiple grids are used. The porous interaction is generalized to arbitrary materials and freely changeable material interaction terms, yielding a flexible, user-controllable framework that is independent of specific constitutive models. The framework is implemented on the GPU in a straightforward and simple way and takes advantage of the rasterization pipeline to resolve write-conflicts, resulting in a portable implementation with wide hardware support, unlike other approaches such as [4].
In the context of augmented reality we define tracking as a collection of methods to obtain the position and orientation (pose) of a user. By means of various displaying techniques, this ensures a correct visual overlay of graphical information onto the reality perceived. Precise results for calculation of the camera pose are gained by methods of image processing, usually analyzing the pixels of an image and extracing features, which can be recognized over the image sequence. However, these methods do not regard the process of image synthesis or at least in a very simplyfied way. In contrast, the class of model-based methods assumes a given 3D model of the observed scene. Based on the model data features can be identified to establish correspondences in the camera image. From these feature correspondences the camera pose is calculated. An interesting approach is the strategy of analysis-by-synthesis, regarding the computer graphics rendering process for extending the knowledge about the model by information from image synthesis and other environment variables.
In this thesis the components of a tracking system are identified and further it is analyzed, to what extend information about the model, the rendering process and the environment can contribute to the components for improvement of the tracking process using analysis-by-synthesis. In particular, by using knowledge as topological information, lighting or perspective, the feature synthesis and correspondence finding should lead to visually unambiguous features that can be predicted and evaluated to be suitable for stable tracking of the camera pose.
The goal of simulations in computergraphics is the simulation of realistic phenomena of materials. Therefore, internal and external acting forces are accumulated in each timestep. From those, new velocities get calculated that ultimately change the positions of geometry or particles. Position Based Dynamics omits thie velocity layer and directly works on the positions. Constraints are a set of rules defining the simulated material. Those rules must not be violated throughout the simulation. If this happens, the violating positions get changed so that the constraints get fullfilled once again. In this work a PBD-framework gets implemented, that allows simulations of solids and fluids. Constraints get solved using GPU implementations of Gauss-Seidel and Gauss-Jakobi solvers. Results are physically plausible simulations that are real-time capable.
This bachelor thesis investigates the utilization of the Wii Balance Board
in virtual reality applications. For the investigation a snowboard game is
implemented, in which the virtual avatar can be controlled with the pressure
sensors of the Wii Balance Board. The user should be able to move
playfully and intuitively through the virtual environment by balancing his
body. The immersiveness and the influence on motion sickness and cybersickness
will be investigated. In Addition, the Wii Balance Board will be
compared with the Xbox Controller. The aim of the work is to evaluate
whether the Wii Balance Board is able to allow free movement in virtual
environments and whether it is more advantageous to use it rather than
a conventional controller. The results of the survey indicate that the Wii
Balance Board has a positive influence on the immersivness of the game,
despite better game results by using a conventional controller. The survey
also reveals that the use of the Wii Balance Board is responsible for more
motion-sickness/cybersickness cases.
In this master's thesis the principle of hybrid ray tracing, consisting of a rasterization pipeline which includes ray tracing techniques for certain effects, is explained and the implementation of an application which uses a hybrid approach in which ray tracing is used to calculate shadows, ambient occlusion, and reflections and combines those with direct lighting is documented and explained. Hybrid ray tracing is based on the idea of combining the performance and flexibility of rasterization-based approaches with ray tracing to overcome the limitation of not being able to access the complete surrounding geometry at any point in the scene.
While describing the implementation of said application, the RTX API which is being used for ray tracing is explained as well Vulkan, the graphics API used.
Based on the results and the insights gained while using the RTX API, it is assessed in regards of its usage scenarios and technical sophistication.
A gonioreflectometer is a device to measure the reflection properties of arbitrary materials. In this work, such an apparatus is being built from easily obtainable parts. Therefore three stepper-motors and 809 light-emitting diodes are controlled by an Arduino microcontroller. RGB-images are captured with an industrial camera which serve as refelction data. Furthermore, a control software with several capture programs and a renderer for displaying the measured materials are implemented. These allow capturing and rendering entire bidirectional reflection distribution functions (BRDFs) by which also complex anisotropic material properties can be represented. Although the quality of the results has some artifacts due to shadows of the camera, these artifacts can be largely removed by using special algorithms like inpainting. In addition, the goniorefelctometer is applied to other use cases. One can perform 3D scans, light field capturing and light staging without altering the construction. The quality of these processes also meet the expectations in a positive way. Thus, the gonioreflectometer built in this work can be seen as a widely applicable and economical alternative to other publications.
Photo realistic rendering of fur is a common problem in computer graphics and is often needed in animation films. This work presents two illumination models, originally presented for human hair rendering. The first model is from Marschner et al. presented in 2003, which is the basis of many other models. The second model is from d’Eon et al., which was presented in 2011. Both models are implemented into a path tracer, which simulates global illumination. The special features of fur fibers in contrast to human hair fibers will be shown and an explanation, to why both models can also be used for fur rendering, will be given. The main point of interest is a realistic visualization of fur. In addition to that the performance of both models will be compared and a suggestion to improve the performance will be given and evaluated in form of the use of a cylindrical intersection object for path tracing.
In no other field of computer science has the hardware been evolved more
quickly than in computer graphics. Therefore the GPU offers, aside from
the pure rendering of triangles, a bunch of further pipeline steps that allows
visualisation of other graphics objects, like freeform surfaces.
This bachelor’s thesis is about the rendering of freeform surfaces, in particular
bezier surfaces. For that reason an implementation for management
and visualisation of bézier surfaces was created for the rendering framework
of the university Koblenz (CVK). For this purpose first a triangulation
was implemented and finally a tesselation of bezier surfaces with normals
and texture coordinates, as well as the handling of trim curves.
Augmented reality is being present for many years. Through progress in technology smaller augmented reality glasses became possible. These new technologies allow many new ways of interaction and usage of augmented reality.
This thesis is about the Microsoft HoloLens and its possiblities for consumers and industry. In the context of this thesis a new interactive and augmented application to measure the possiblities and limitations of the Microsoft HoloLens has been developed. The scene is an assembly szenario with a step by step instruction of building with Lego bricks. The evaluation showed that the HoloLens can already be used to assist in assembling scenarios and offers some advantages over other methods, although the glasses still have some flaws.
This thesis tests several methods and measures in pathtracing for selecting either the Line Space or the Bounding Volume Hierarchy data structure to make use of the advantages of both. The structures are defined locally around each object and each Line Space shaft contains one candidate ID each. All implementation is done as a C++ and OpenGL framework with compute shaders handling the pathtracing and Line Space generation. The measures include the probability distribution, the effect dependency, as well as a distance threshold and are tested against several different scenes. In most situations, the results show a noticeable increase in performance, partly only with minor visual differences, with the probability measure producing the highest quality images for a given performance. The fundamental problems of the Line Space concering the high memory consumption and a long generation time compared to the BVH still persist, despite the object local structure, a minimal amount of data per shaft and the compute shader implementation.
This thesis presents two methods for the computation of global illumination. The first is an extension of Reflective Shadow Maps with an additional shadow test in order to handle occlusion. The second method is a novel, bidirectional Light-Injection approach. Rays originating from the light source are traced through the scene and stored inside the shafts of the Linespace datastructure. These shafts are a discretization of the possible spatial directions. The Linespaces are embedded in a Uniform Grid. When retrieving this pre-calculated lightning information no traversal of datastructures and no additional indirection is necessary in the best-case scenario. This reduces computation time and variance compared to Pathtracing. Areas that are mostly lit indirectly and glas profit the most from this. However, the result is only approximative in nature and produces visible artifacts.
This thesis explores different approaches for the acceleration of raytracing calculations on the graphics processing unit (GPU). For that a voxel grid is used and extended by the linespace data structure. The linespace consists of direction based shafts and stores the objects located in those shafts in a candidate list. Different methods for the sorting and traversal of the linespace are presented and evaluated. The shown methods cannot provide a speed up of the frame rate without resulting in a loss of image quality.
This thesis presents the use of a local linespace data structure, which is designed and implemented on the basis of an existing GPU-based raytra- cer with a global linespace data structure. For each scene object, an N-tree is generated whose nodes each have a linespace. This saves informations about existing geometry in its shafts. A shaft represents a volume between two faces on the outside of the node. This allows a faster skipping of em- pty spaces during raytracing. Identical objects can access already calcula- ted linespaces, which can reduce the memory requirement by up to 94.13% and the initialization time of the datastructure by up to 97.15%. Due to the local access possibilities dynamic scenes can be visualized. An increase in quality can also be observed.
This thesis presents a novel technique in computer graphics to simulate realtime
global illumination using path tracing. Path tracing is done with compute shaders on the graphics card (GPU) to perform rendering in a highly parallelized manner. To improve the overall performance of tracing rays, the Line Space is used as an acceleration data structure in different variations, resulting in better
empty space skipping. The Line Space saves scene information based on a previous voxelization in direction-dependent shafts and is generated and traversed on the GPU. With this procedure, indirect lighting and soft shadows can be computed in a physically correct way. Furthermore, using the Line Space, path tracing can be performed mostly independent of the complexity of the scene geometry with over 100 frames per second, which is truly real-time and much faster than using a comparable voxel grid. The image quality is not affected negatively by this technique and the shadow quality is in most cases much better compared to shadow-mapping.
Augmented Reality has many areas of application. It can be used to simplify everyday life as well as working processes. However, since there are
many manufacturers that offer greatly varying systems, choosing the correct system according to application as well as cross-platform development are dfficult. This thesis attempts to develop an application which can be used to simulate Augmented Reality devices on Virtual Reality systems. This should simplify the processes of choosing a system as well as cross-platform
development.
Since the simulation will be designed to run on mobile devices, it should be possible to render high quality, realistic environments in advance, using a panoramic image. On a Virtual Reality device, they need to be displayed as a stereoscopic image. To achieve this, several methods are presented that can be used to perform this conversion. An editor will be created which will allow the creation of scenes, configuration of Augmented Reality devices and displaying them on a Virtual Reality system. For closing this thesis a test will be performed, to check the quality of the simulation as well as improvements that can be made.
This thesis presents an approach to optimizing the computation of soft shadows from area lights. The light source is sampled uniformly by traversing shadow rays as packets through an N-tree. This data structure stores an additional line space for every node. A line space stores precomputed information about geometry inside of shafts from one to another side of the node. This visibility information is used to terminate a ray. Additionally the graphics processing unit (short GPU) is used to speed up the computations through parallelism. The scene is rendered with OpenGL and the shadow value is computed on the GPU for each pixel. Evaluating the implementation shows a performance gain of 86% by comparison to the CPU, if using the GPU implementation. Using the line space instead of triangle intersections also increases the performance. The implementation provides good scaling with an increasing amount of triangles and has no visual disadvantages for many rays.