# Tag Info

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The term "distributed ray tracing" was originally coined by Robert Cook in this 1984 paper. His observation was that in order to perform anti-aliasing in a ray-tracer, the renderer needs to perform spatial upsampling - that is, to take more samples (i.e. shoot more rays) than the number of pixels in the image and combine their results. One way to do this is ...

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It's unfortunate that people commonly recommend this. Blending between two (or four, etc.) translated copies of a noise function in that way is a pretty bad idea. Not only is it expensive, it doesn't even produce correct-looking results! On the left is some Perlin noise. On the right is two instances of Perlin noise, stacked and blended left-to-right. ...

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The Lane-Riesenfeld algorithm subdivides the control polygon of a B-spline to create a new control polygon with the same limit spline. It's made up of two steps: first, duplicating all of the control points $P_i$ into $P^\prime_{2i}$ and $P^\prime_{2i+1}$; then, moving each point to the midpoint between it and the next point, so $P^\prime_i \rightarrow \... 14 The texture filtering hardware takes several samples of the various mipmap levels (the maximum amount of samples is indicated by the anisotropic filtering level, though the exact amount of samples taken in a given filtering operation will depend on the proportion between the derivatives on the fragment.) If you project the cone viewing a surface at an ... 14 Bézier curves are mathematical entities and have no clearly defined center. One can in fact define many different things as the center of the Bézier curve. I have tried to depict some of the possible centers in image 1. More than this do exist. Image 1: Some of the possible centers of a single span Bézier curve In practice nearly all graphics applications ... 13 Flat shading is the simplest shading model. Each rendered polygon has a single normal vector; shading for the entire polygon is constant across the surface of the polygon. With a small polygon count, this gives curved surfaces a faceted look. Phong shading is the most sophisticated of the three methods you list. Each rendered polygon has one normal ... 13 (XYZ) can be the RGB colour you want to tint your scene by. For the above scene it can be a red colour (1.0, 0.0, 0.0) or something similar with a strong red component. Bear in mind that since you are applying the colour in a multiplicative way it will act as a filter suppressing original colour components. So if your scene is mostly green but you apply (i.... 11 The idea I would try to apply would be the following: I make the example for the curve, but it should be straightforward for the application for the surface. Let's say we have a curve$\gamma$uniformly parametrized. Let's say the parameter of the curve is$s$. Your goal is to sample point corresponding to value of$s$such that the curvature is high. If ... 10 For these types of algorithms, you usually have to rely on multiple forms of texture synthesis. That doesn't mean you have to generate the whole texture from scratch. For example, you could regenerate the sides of the texture to achieve a seamless effect. This answer may not be complete because it's a large field, and different approaches will have various ... 9 it is quite easy to measure the local max frequency in an image (at least as a low resolution mask, with some regularization). Several papers of the MIT graphics group have been around detecting and processing from this kind of clue, with regular or coded aperture cameras. e.g. Defocus Magnification and Image and Depth from a Conventional Camera with a Coded ... 9 It is in fact possible to augment a ray tracer to make it capable of simulating wave effects. The paper Rendering Wave Effects with Augmented Light Field describes one way to do it. In summary, they introduce a framework called Augmented Light Field that allows them to model wave effects with a ray-based representation. In this framework, rays can carry ... 9 The API requirements can be found in any of the specs or extensions. Here is one: https://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/EXT/texture_filter_anisotropic.txt All GPU vendors likely deviate from the spec because AF-quality used to be a part of many benchmarks. And current implementations will continue to keep on evolving as new workloads stress the existing ... 9 All conics (including rotated ellipses) can be described by an implicit equation of the form H(x, y) = A x² + B xy + C y² + D x + E y + F = 0 The basic principle of the incremental line tracing algorithms (I wouldn't call them scanline) is to follow the pixels that fulfill the equation as much as possible. Depending on the local slope of the line, you ... 9 As you discovered and mentioned in your self-answer, the pattern in the background appears to be a sum of sinusoidal gradients. However, the example linked to in your answer is more complicated than that used by µTorrent. The background of the About window appears to be a static pattern, rather than the animated sinusoidal pattern used in the plasma post. ... 9 Perlin noise is just a base block, not very interesting by itself. You don't need to modify it, but to combine and filter it in interesting ways. Look at how to make fractal Brownian motion (fBm) with it for example, which combines octaves based on few parameters to get a richer texture. The question of terrain rendering is a difficult one and a topic of ... 9 Lots of things here. "When reading papers". What papers? If the topic of the paper is about something other than the spatial partitioning structure, it could be fair to use whatever knowing that the basic ideas will translate to other structures. Or not, hard to say. "For example for ray tracing an oct tree, near misses will cause you to iterate through a ... 8 The classic book Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice (second edition) by Foley, van Dam, et al. describes such an algorithm in section 19.2. The explanation in the book seems to come from an MSc thesis, Raster Algorithms for 2D Primitives by Dilip Da Silva. See also these papers: Curve-drawing algorithms for raster displays by Van Aken and Novak (... 8 One red flag is the use of new several times within the loop. Memory allocation doesn't belong in a rasterizer! :) Certainly you should not need to allocate a Point object (which is used once and then immediately discarded) and do a method call on it, just in order to fill a single pixel! The pixels are hopefully stored as a flat array of bytes, so just ... 7 The common way to render transparent polygons in a rasterizer is by use of Alpha Blending, which basically combines the colour of the supposedly transparent pixel with the colour of the background at that pixel's position, this way rendering the pixel transparently onto what was already rendered before. This technique, however, requires your polygons (or at ... 7 It looks like a voronoi diagram with a non-Euclidean distance metric. Probably not Manhattan L1 but something close related, but maybe Mahalanobis with some kind of restriction on seed point generation and movement. A similar result may be calculated with Weight-proportional Space Partitioning Using Adaptive Voronoi Diagrams when reducing spatial resolution ... 6 As you've surmised, the transform() function transforms points from one co-ordinate space to another. (There are also vtransform() and ntransform() for transforming direction vectors and normal vectors, respectively.) The string argument names the co-ordinate space to transform into. The Renderman Shading Guidelines have this to say about it: At the ... 6 The best place to put a look up table for a GPU compute shader depends on the size of the lookup table, and the frequency/coherency of access. In your case (you mentioned 4kb), shared local memory would likely be best (assuming you do not need this memory for other purposes in the same kernel). This memory has different names in different APIs, but is the ... 6 The general problem is called graph drawing and is not an easy problem. The graphs that can be drawn on the plane without crossings are called planar, but not all graphs are planar: the typical graphs that are not planar are the complete graph on$5$vertices$K_5$and the complete bipartite graph on 6 vertices$K_{3,3}\$, famous because of the three ...

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If your wall geometry is vector graphics you can simply extrude the segment away from the light position. This means 2 triangles per draw call, all the extrusion offsets can can be handled in the vertex shader. Image 1: For each wall generate a shadow volume extrusion. Quick and extremely dirty sample implementation of shadow volumes here: http://...

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Extending Kostas Anagnostou's answer, a commonly used formula for desaturation is float value = 0.3 * InputR + 0.59 * InputG + 0.11 * InputB; This accomodates the fact that different color hues are perceived with a different intensity by a human observer. Further following the example, you would then define some tint color that is multiplied with the ...

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In Distributed ray tracing, You stochastically sample many rays in directions which may or may not be preferred by the BRDF. Whereas, in Monte Carlo ray tracing or simply path tracing, you sample only one ray in a direction preferred by the BRDF. So, there are two obvious advantages Path Tracing would have: Computationally less expensive. Which means with ...

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If you are in a hurry to get your renderer working and you already have the filled polygonal routine functioning correctly, can I suggest an alternative, possibly easier approach? Though I'm not familiar with Lua, it seems you are solving for the exact intersection of a scan line with the quadratic Bezier which, though admirable, is possibly overkill. ...

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Looking at the video you provided, I would tend to think it's something along those lines: A particle emitter, to which all threads are attached, is moving around. I haven't really figured what its motion is dictated by. Each thread is made of particles flowing away from the emitter. The thread has a direction, used for the initial speed of the particles. ...

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Yes, it is possible to use only integer calculations. I will describe how, but bear in mind that the difference in speed between integer arithmetic and floating point arithmetic is not as great as it was historically. If you want your code to run faster, it is best to profile and identify which parts of the code are taking up most time, before considering ...

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This is a bit different from a conventional photogrammetry problem. You're not trying to estimate a 3D world from 2D projections. You have actual 3D information - you have the imaging slices - and you want to assemble them into a 3D model. That's a much easier problem, the kind you can solve from the comfort of your couch. Do know the cutting planes that ...

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