research-article

A hierarchical volumetric shadow algorithm for single scattering

Authors:

Jonathan Ragan-Kelley,

Jaakko LehtinenAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), Volume 29, Issue 6

Article No.: 178, Pages 1 - 10

https://doi.org/10.1145/1882261.1866200

Published: 15 December 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Volumetric effects such as beams of light through participating media are an important component in the appearance of the natural world. Many such effects can be faithfully modeled by a single scattering medium. In the presence of shadows, rendering these effects can be prohibitively expensive: current algorithms are based on ray marching, i.e., integrating the illumination scattered towards the camera along each view ray, modulated by visibility to the light source at each sample. Visibility must be determined for each sample using shadow rays or shadow-map lookups. We observe that in a suitably chosen coordinate system, the visibility function has a regular structure that we can exploit for significant acceleration compared to brute force sampling. We propose an efficient algorithm based on partial sum trees for computing the scattering integrals in a single-scattering homogeneous medium. On a CPU, we achieve speedups of 17--120x over ray marching.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental material. (178-0252-auxiliary.zip)

Download
106.29 MB

References

[1]

Aila, T., and Laine, S. 2009. Understanding the efficiency of ray traversal on gpus. In Proc. High-Performance Graphics 2009, 145--149.

Digital Library

[2]

Billeter, M., Sintorn, E., and Assarsson, U. 2010. Real time volumetric shadows using polygonal light volumes. In Proc. High Performance Graphics 2010.

Digital Library

[3]

Dobashi, Y., Yamamoto, T., and Nishita, T. 2000. Interactive rendering method for displaying shafts of light. In Proc. Pacific Graphics, IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 31.

Digital Library

[4]

Donnelly, W., and Lauritzen, A. 2006. Variance shadow maps. In Proc. 2006 symposium on Interactive 3D graphics and games, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 161--165.

Digital Library

[5]

Engelhardt, T., and Dachsbacher, C. 2010. Epipolar sampling for shadows and crepuscular rays in participating media with single scattering. In Proc. 2010 ACM SIGGRAPH symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, ACM, 119--125.

Digital Library

[6]

Fenwick, P. M. 1994. A new data structure for cumulative frequency tables. Software, practice & experience 24, 3, 327--336.

Digital Library

[7]

Golub, G. H., and Van Loan, C. F. 1996. Matrix Computations, 3rd. ed. The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Digital Library

[8]

Jarosz, W., Zwicker, M., and Jensen, H. W. 2008. The beam radiance estimate for volumetric photon mapping. Computer Graphics Forum 27, 2 (Apr.), 557--566.

[9]

Jensen, H. W., and Christensen, P. H. 1998. Efficient simulation of light transport in scenes with participating media using photon maps. In Proc. SIGGRAPH 98, 311--320.

Digital Library

[10]

Kopf, J., Cohen, M. F., Lischinski, D., and Uyttendaele, M. 2007. Joint bilateral upsampling. ACM Trans. Graph. 26, 3.

Digital Library

[11]

Lloyd, D. B., Tuft, D., Yoon, S.-E., and Manocha, D. 2006. Warping and partitioning for low error shadow maps. In Proc. Eurographics Workshop on Rendering 2006, 215--226.

Digital Library

[12]

Max, N. L. 1986. Atmospheric illumination and shadows. In Computer Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH '86), ACM, New York, NY, USA, 117--124.

Digital Library

[13]

Mitchell, K. 2008. Volumetric light scattering as a post-process. In GPU Gems 3, Addison-Wesley.

[14]

Pegoraro, V., and Parker, S. 2009. An analytical solution to single scattering in homogeneous participating media. Computer Graphics Forum 28, 2.

[15]

Pharr, M., and Humphreys, G. 2004. Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation. Morgan Kaufmann.

Digital Library

[16]

Sun, B., Ramamoorthi, R., Narasimhan, S., and Nayar, S. 2005. A practical analytic single scattering model for real time rendering. ACM Trans. Graph. 24, 3.

Digital Library

[17]

Sun, X., Zhou, K., Lin, S., and Guo, B. 2010. Line space gathering for single scattering in large scenes. ACM Trans. Graph. 29, 4.

Digital Library

[18]

Wyman, C., and Ramsey, S. 2008. Interactive volumetric shadows in participating media with single-scattering. In Proc. IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing, 87--92.

Cited By

Velinov ZMitchell K(2023)Collimated Whole Volume Light Scattering in Homogeneous Finite MediaIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2021.313576429:7(3145-3157)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TVCG.2021.3135764
Taif KUgail HMehmood I(2020)Cast Shadow Generation Using Generative Adversarial NetworksComputational Science – ICCS 202010.1007/978-3-030-50426-7_36(481-495)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50426-7_36
Kolivand HSunar MKakh SAl-Rousan RIsmail I(2018)Photorealistic renderingMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-018-5834-777:19(25983-26008)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11042-018-5834-7
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

A hierarchical volumetric shadow algorithm for single scattering
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Computer graphics
    1. Image manipulation
      1. Texturing

Recommendations

Epipolar sampling for shadows and crepuscular rays in participating media with single scattering
I3D '10: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGGRAPH symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games

Scattering in participating media, such as fog or haze, generates volumetric lighting effects known as crepuscular or god rays. Rendering such effects greatly enhances the realism in virtual scenes, but is inherently costly as scattering events occur at ...
Real-time volumetric shadows using 1D min-max mipmaps
I3D '11: Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games

Light scattering in a participating medium is responsible for several important effects we see in the natural world. In the presence of occluders, computing single scattering requires integrating the illumination scattered towards the eye along the ...
A hierarchical volumetric shadow algorithm for single scattering
SIGGRAPH ASIA '10: ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2010 papers

Volumetric effects such as beams of light through participating media are an important component in the appearance of the natural world. Many such effects can be faithfully modeled by a single scattering medium. In the presence of shadows, rendering ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics

ACM Transactions on Graphics Volume 29, Issue 6

December 2010

480 pages

ISSN:0730-0301

EISSN:1557-7368

DOI:10.1145/1882261

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2010 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 ACM 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: 15 December 2010

Published in TOG Volume 29, Issue 6

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

21
Total Citations
View Citations
739
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)1
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 10 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Velinov ZMitchell K(2023)Collimated Whole Volume Light Scattering in Homogeneous Finite MediaIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2021.313576429:7(3145-3157)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TVCG.2021.3135764
Taif KUgail HMehmood I(2020)Cast Shadow Generation Using Generative Adversarial NetworksComputational Science – ICCS 202010.1007/978-3-030-50426-7_36(481-495)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50426-7_36
Kolivand HSunar MKakh SAl-Rousan RIsmail I(2018)Photorealistic renderingMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-018-5834-777:19(25983-26008)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11042-018-5834-7
Ali HSunar MKolivand H(2018)Realistic real-time rendering of light shafts using blur filterMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-017-5267-877:13(17007-17022)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11042-017-5267-8
Ali HSunar MKolivand H(2017)Soft bilateral filtering volumetric shadows using cube shadow mapsPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.017841512:6(e0178415)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2017
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0178415
Kol TKlehm OSeidel HEisemann E(2017)Expressive Single Scattering for Light Shaft StylizationIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2016.255411423:7(1753-1766)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2016.2554114
Ali HSunar MKolivand H(2017)Realistic Rendering Colored Light Shafts Using Light TextureRecent Trends in Information and Communication Technology10.1007/978-3-319-59427-9_38(353-360)Online publication date: 27-May-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59427-9_38
Peters CMunstermann CWetzstein NKlein RWyman CYuksel C(2016)Beyond hard shadowsProceedings of the 20th ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games10.1145/2856400.2856402(159-170)Online publication date: 27-Feb-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2856400.2856402
Klehm OKol TSeidel HEisemann EZhang HTang T(2015)Stylized scattering via transfer functions and occluder manipulationProceedings of the 41st Graphics Interface Conference10.5555/2788890.2788911(115-121)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2788890.2788911
Belcour LBala KSoler C(2014)A Local Frequency Analysis of Light Scattering and AbsorptionACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/262949033:5(1-17)Online publication date: 23-Sep-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2629490
Show More Cited By

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