Abstract
Reflections and refractions are important visual effects that have long been considered too costly for interactive applications. Although most contemporary graphics hardware supports reflections off curved surfaces in the form of environment maps, refractions in thick, solid objects cannot be handled with this approach, and the simplifying assumptions of environment maps also produce visible artifacts for reflections.
Only recently have researchers developed techniques for the interactive rendering of true reflections and refractions in curved objects. This paper introduces a new, light field based approach to achieving this goal. The method is based on a strict decoupling of geometry and illumination. Hardware support for all stages of the technique is possible through existing extensions of the OpenGL rendering pipeline. In addition, we also discuss storage issues and introduce methods for handling vector-quantized data with graphics hardware.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
E. H. Adelson and J. R. Bergen. Computational Models of Visual Processing, chapter 1 (The Plenoptic Function and the Elements of Early Vision). MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991.
J. F. Blinn and M. E. Newell. Texture and reflection in computer generated images. Communications of the ACM, 19:542–546, 1976.
M. Born and E. Wolf. Principles of Optics. Pergamon Press, Oxford, 6 edition, 1993.
E. Camahort, A. Lerios, and D. Fussell. Uniformly sampled light fields. In Rendering Techniques’ 98, pages 117–130, March 1998.
P. J. Diefenbach. Pipeline Rendering: Interaction and Realism Through Hardware-based Multi-Pass Rendering. PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania, June 1996.
S. J. Gortler, R. Grzeszczuk, R. Szelinski, and M. F. Cohen. The Lumigraph. In SIGGRAPH’ 96 Proceedings, pages 43–54, August 1996.
P. Haeberli and M. Segal. Texture mapping as A fundamental drawing primitive. In Fourth Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, pages 259–266, June 1993.
P. Hansen. Introducing pixel texture. In Developer News, pages 23–26. SGI, May 1997.
W. Heidrich. High-quality Shading and Lighting for Hardware-accelerated Rendering. PhD thesis, University of Erlangen-NĂĽrnberg, April 1999.
W. Heidrich and H.-P. Seidel. View-independent environment maps. In Eurograph-ics/SIGGRAPH Workshop on Graphics Hardware, pages 39–45, 1998.
W. Heidrich and H.-P. Seidel. Realistic, hardware-accelerated shading and lighting. In SIGGRAPH’ 99 Proceedings, August 1999. See http://www.mpi-sb.mpg.de/~heidrich.
W. Heidrich, R. Westermann, H.-P. Seidel, and Th. Ertl. Applications of pixel textures in visualization and realistic image synthesis. In Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, 1999.
M. Levoy and P. Hanrahan. Light field rendering. In SIGGRAPH’ 96 Proceedings, pages 31–42, August 1996.
D. Lischinski and A. Rappoport. Image-based rendering for non-diffuse synthetic scenes. In Rendering Techniques’ 98, pages 301–314, June 1998.
G. Miller, S. Rubin, and D. Ponceleon. Lazy decompression of surface light fields for pre-computed global illumination. In Rendering Techniques’ 98, pages 281–292, March 1998.
E. Ofek and A. Rappoport. Interactive reflections on curved objects. In SIGGRAPH’ 98 Proceedings, pages 333–342, July 1998.
SGI. Pixel Texture Extension, December 1996. Specification document, available from http://www.opengl.org.
J. W. Shade, S. J. Gortler, L. He, and R. Szeliski. Layered depth images. In SIGGRAPH’ 98 Proceedings, pages 231–242, July 1998.
P.-P. Sloan, M. F. Cohen, and S. J. Gortler. Time critical Lumigraph rendering. In Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, 1997.
R. Westermann and Th. Ertl. Efficiently using graphics hardware in volume rendering applications. In SIGGRAPH’ 98 Proceedings, pages 169–178, July 1998.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1999 Springer-Verlag/Wien
About this paper
Cite this paper
Heidrich, W., Lensch, H., Cohen, M.F., Seidel, HP. (1999). Light Field Techniques for Reflections and Refractions. In: Lischinski, D., Larson, G.W. (eds) Rendering Techniques’ 99. EGSR 1999. Eurographics. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-6809-7_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-6809-7_17
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Vienna
Print ISBN: 978-3-211-83382-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-7091-6809-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive