Abstract
In the past decade, graphics hardware has improved dramatically, especially on the capabilities of graphics processing units (GPUs). The most prominent improvements are realization of programmable shaders for real-time rendering and general purpose computation with graphics processing units (GPGPUs) for advance rendering. The exquisite geometry details and vivid surface shading are therefore produced in real time. Modern games usually present the geometry details with a huge number of small-area primitives to improve the quality of final videos. To render such scenes, inverse displacement mapping methods, one kind of ray-tracing-based method, are a better choice than the rasterization approaches (used in traditional real-time 3D graphics) which is designed for large-area primitives. However, existed inverse displacement mapping methods are limited to planar surface. To eliminate the constraint, I propose an arbitrary-surface-supported inverse displacement mapping method in 2. With the proposed algorithm, the silhouette and geometry detail are rendered correctly in real time. In computer graphics, “Real-time” global illumination is a big challenge. It still takes minutes to days to synthesize a single image, even though the newest graphics hardware (GPGPUs) speeds up the process by 2~100 times. Thus, not only computing power but also better algorithms are required to achieve real time. In 3, a spatio-temporal approach for the low-frequency indirect lighting is proposed. This method amortizes the cost over a sequence of image frames. As the result, the computing power requirement is dramatically reduced, and the indirect lighting effect is rendered in real-time.