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Interactive Mesostructures

Nykl, Scott L.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1382459151

Abstract Details

2013, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (Engineering and Technology).
Humans live in a 3D reality and experience a 3D world. As a result, 3D computer graphics is a natural way to present digital data to humans. Virtual worlds of great complexity are naturally perceived and understood by the human visual system. This mechanism offers an efficient pathway to transfer digital data from a display into human knowledge. Computing 3D rendering output requires a specific computational complexity for a specific scene. The ever increasing demand to expand a scene's boundaries, add additional details, and enhance a scene's behavior present challenges to both the rendering hardware and rendering algorithms. This work presents a set of novel image-based algorithmic rendering approaches designed for massive concurrent execution on modern programmable Graphical Processor Units (GPUs). These approaches make use of constructs known as billboards and mesostructures, their goal is to render as much interactive detail as possible while maintaining real-time framerates. First, billboards are used to dynamically generate image-based impostors of computationally expensive objects within a scene. These impostors are subsequently rendered in lieu of the original geometry thus reducing the scene's overall rendering time. Impostors are then applied to the real-time visualization of tens of millions of 3D Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) data points enabling highly interactive visualizations previously unable to be achieved on commodity hardware. Second, mesostructures are used to dynamically generate a 3D height field on top of an existing geometrical surface via a 2D texture known as a displacement map. This work presents a technique for interactively deforming and colliding with mesostructures at a per-texel level. This technique integrates well with existing physics engines and is able to reduce traditional 3D geometrical deformations (vertex-based) to 2D image space operations (pixel-based) that are parallelized on a GPU without CPU-GPU data shuffling. Additionally, surface and material properties may be specified at a per-texel level enabling a mesostructure to possess varying attributes intrinsic to its surface and collision behavior; furthermore, this offers an image-based alternative to traditional decals. The technique provides a simple way to make almost every surface in a virtual world responsive to user actions and events. It requires no preprocessing time and storage requirements of one additional texture or less. The algorithm uses existing inverse displacement map algorithms as well as existing physics engines and can be easily incorporated into new or existing game pipelines.
David Chelberg, PhD (Advisor)
135 p.
Computer Science
Interactive Mesostructures; Inverse Displacement Mapping; Mesostructures; Quadric based Mesostructures; Interactive Deformation; GPU; GPGPU; CUDA; Per-texel Collision Detection; Image-based Rendering; Surface Details; Compute Shaders

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Nykl, S. L. (2013). Interactive Mesostructures [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1382459151

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Nykl, Scott. Interactive Mesostructures. 2013. Ohio University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1382459151.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Nykl, Scott. "Interactive Mesostructures." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio University, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1382459151

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ohiou1382459151
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© 2013, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Ohio University and OhioLINK.