research-article

Moment-Based Order-Independent Transparency

Authors:

Cedrick Münstermann,

Stefan Krumpen,

Reinhard Klein,

Christoph PetersAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, Volume 1, Issue 1

Article No.: 7, Pages 1 - 20

https://doi.org/10.1145/3203206

Published: 25 July 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Compositing transparent surfaces rendered in an arbitrary order requires techniques for order-independent transparency. Each surface color needs to be multiplied by the appropriate transmittance to the eye to incorporate occlusion. Building upon moment shadow mapping, we present a moment-based method for compact storage and fast reconstruction of this depth-dependent function per pixel. We work with the logarithm of the transmittance such that the function may be accumulated additively rather than multiplicatively. Then an additive rendering pass for all transparent surfaces yields moments. Moment-based reconstruction algorithms provide approximations to the original function, which are used for compositing in a second additive pass. We utilize existing algorithms with four or six power moments and develop new algorithms using eight power moments or up to four trigonometric moments. The resulting techniques are completely order-independent, work well for participating media as well as transparent surfaces and come in many variants providing different tradeoffs. We also utilize the same approach for the closely related problem of computing shadows for transparent surfaces.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental file (07-munstermann-supplemental.zip)

In this supplementary document, we provide a concise overview of the optimal strategies for biasing and the quantization transforms. Besides we provide results for variants of techniques, which have not been discussed in the paper. HLSL code for all of our techniques and a video are available separately.

Download
103.01 MB

References

[1]

Thomas Annen, Tom Mertens, Philippe Bekaert, Hans-Peter Seidel, and Jan Kautz. 2007. Convolution Shadow Maps. In EGSR07:18th Eurographics Symposium on Rendering. Eurographics Association, 51--60.

Digital Library

[2]

Louis Bavoil, Steven P. Callahan, Aaron Lefohn, João L. D. Comba, and Cláudio T. Silva. 2007. Multi-fragment Effects on the GPU Using the K-buffer. In Proceedings of the 2007 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (13D '07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 97--104.

Digital Library

[3]

James F. Blinn. 2007. How to Solve a Cubic Equation, Part 5: Back to Numerics. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 27, 3 (May 2007), 78--89.

Digital Library

[4]

Loren Carpenter. 1984. The A -buffer, an Antialiased Hidden Surface Method. SIGGRAPH Comput. Graph. 18, 3 (Jan. 1984), 103--108.

Digital Library

[5]

Cyril Delalandre, Pascal Gautron, Jean-Eudes Marvie, and Guillaume François. 2011. Transmittance Function Mapping. In Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D '11). ACM, 31--38.

Digital Library

[6]

Eric Enderton, Erik Sintorn, Peter Shirley, and David Luebke. 2011. Stochastic Transparency. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 17, 8 (Aug 2011), 1036--1047.

Digital Library

[7]

Cass Everitt. 2001. Interactive order-independent transparency. (2001). http://www.nvidia.com/object/Interactive_Order_Transparency.html NVIDIA whitepaper.

[8]

Don Herbison-Evans. 1995. Solving quartics and cubics for graphics. In Graphics Gems V, Alan W. Paeth (Ed.). Academic Press, Inc., Chapter I.1, 3--15.

[9]

Jon Jansen and Louis Bavoil. 2010. Fourier Opacity Mapping. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (i3D '10). ACM, 165--172.

Digital Library

[10]

Mark Grigorievich Kreın and Adol'f Abramovich Nudel'man. 1977. The Markov Moment Problem and Extremal Problems. Translations of Mathematical Monographs, Vol. 50. American Mathematical Society.

[11]

Tom Lokovic and Eric Veach. 2000. Deep Shadow Maps. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH '00). ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., New York, NY, USA, 385--392.

Digital Library

[12]

Marilena Maule, João Comba, Rafael Torchelsen, and Rui Bastos. 2013. Hybrid Transparency. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 103--118.

Digital Library

[13]

Morgan McGuire and Louis Bavoil. 2013. Weighted Blended Order-Independent Transparency. Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques (JCGT) 2, 2 (18 December 2013), 122--141. http://jcgt.org/published/0002/02/09/

[14]

Morgan McGuire and Eric Enderton. 2011. Colored Stochastic Shadow Maps. In Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 89--96.

Digital Library

[15]

Morgan McGuire and Michael Mara. 2017. Phenomenological Transparency. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 23, 5 (May 2017), 1465--1478.

Digital Library

[16]

Houman Meshkin. 2007. Sort-independent alpha blending. (2007). GDC Session.

[17]

Stefan Neumark. 1965. Chapter 3 - Quartic Equation. In Solution of Cubic and Quartic Equations. Pergamon Press, 12--24.

[18]

Ola Olsson, Emil Persson, and Markus Billeter. 2015. Real-time Many-light Management and Shadows with Clustered Shading. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2015 Courses (SIGGRAPH '15). ACM, Article 12, 398 pages.

Digital Library

[19]

Christoph Peters. 2017. Non-linearly Quantized Moment Shadow Maps. In Proceedings of High Performance Graphics (HPG '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 15, 11 pages.

Digital Library

[20]

Christoph Peters and Reinhard Klein. 2015. Moment Shadow Mapping. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (i3D '15). ACM, 7--14.

Digital Library

[21]

Christoph Peters, Cedrick Münstermann, Nico Wetzstein, and Reinhard Klein. 2017. Improved Moment Shadow Maps for Translucent Occluders, Soft Shadows and Single Scattering. Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques (JCGT) 6, 1 (2017), 17--67. http://jcgt.org/published/0006/01/03/

[22]

Thomas Porter and Tom Duff. 1984. Compositing Digital Images. SIGGRAPH Comput. Graph. 18, 3 (Jan. 1984), 253--259.

Digital Library

[23]

Marco Salvi, Jefferson Montgomery, and Aaron Lefohn. 2011. Adaptive Transparency. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on High Performance Graphics (HPG '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 119--126.

Digital Library

[24]

Marco Salvi and Karthik Vaidyanathan. 2014. Multi-layer Alpha Blending. In Proceedings of the 18th Meeting of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 151--158.

Digital Library

[25]

Marco Salvi, Kiril Vidimče, Andrew Lauritzen, and Aaron Lefohn. 2010. Adaptive Volumetric Shadow Maps. Computer Graphics Forum 29, 4 (2010), 1289--1296.

Digital Library

[26]

Chris Wyman and Morgan McGuire. 2017. Improved Alpha Testing Using Hashed Sampling. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics PP, 99 (2017), 1--1.

[27]

Jason C. Yang, Justin Hensley, Holger Grün, and Nicolas Thibieroz. 2010. Real-Time Concurrent Linked List Construction on the GPU. Computer Graphics Forum 29, 4 (2010), 1297--1304.

Digital Library

Cited By

Currius RAssarsson USintorn E(2022)Real-Time Hair Filtering with Convolutional Neural NetworksProceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques10.1145/35226065:1(1-15)Online publication date: 4-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3522606
Peters CMerzbach SHanika JDachsbacher C(2019)Using moments to represent bounded signals for spectral renderingACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/3306346.332296438:4(1-14)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3306346.3322964
Sharpe BMolnar S(2018)Moment transparencyProceedings of the Conference on High-Performance Graphics10.1145/3231578.3231585(1-4)Online publication date: 10-Aug-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3231578.3231585
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Moment-Based Order-Independent Transparency
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Computer graphics
    1. Rendering
      1. Rasterization
      2. Visibility

Recommendations

Moment transparency
HPG '18: Proceedings of the Conference on High-Performance Graphics

We introduce moment transparency, a new solution to real-time order-independent transparency. It expands upon existing approximate transmittance function techniques by using moments to capture and reconstruct the transmittance function. Because the ...
Hybrid transparency
I3D '13: Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games

Hybrid transparency is an approach for real-time approximation of order-independent transparency. Our hybrid approach combines an accurate compositing, of a few core transparent layers, with a quick approximation, for the remaining layers. Its main ...
Non-linearly quantized moment shadow maps
HPG '17: Proceedings of High Performance Graphics

Moment shadow maps enable direct filtering to accomplish proper antialiasing of dynamic hard shadows. For each texel, the moment shadow map stores four powers of the depth in either 64 or 128 bits. After filtering, this information enables a heuristic ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques

Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Volume 1, Issue 1

July 2018

378 pages

EISSN:2577-6193

DOI:10.1145/3242771

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 July 2018

Accepted: 01 April 2018

Revised: 01 March 2018

Received: 01 December 2017

Published in PACMCGIT Volume 1, Issue 1

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

4
Total Citations
View Citations
376
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)69
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)3

Reflects downloads up to 02 Sep 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Currius RAssarsson USintorn E(2022)Real-Time Hair Filtering with Convolutional Neural NetworksProceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques10.1145/35226065:1(1-15)Online publication date: 4-May-2022
Peters CMerzbach SHanika JDachsbacher C(2019)Using moments to represent bounded signals for spectral renderingACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/3306346.332296438:4(1-14)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2019
Sharpe BMolnar S(2018)Moment transparencyProceedings of the Conference on High-Performance Graphics10.1145/3231578.3231585(1-4)Online publication date: 10-Aug-2018
Molnar S(2018)Proceedings of the Conference on High-Performance GraphicsundefinedOnline publication date: 10-Aug-2018

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents