# Tag Info

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The short answer: They are not interchangeable, but their meaning can sometimes appear to overlap in computer graphics literature, giving the potential for confusion. Albedo is the proportion of incident light that is reflected away from a surface. Diffuse reflection is the reflection of light in many directions, rather than in just one direction like a ...

26

An architectural advantage of compute shaders for image processing is that they skip the ROP step. It's very likely that writes from pixel shaders go through all the regular blending hardware even if you don't use it. Generally speaking compute shaders go through a different (and often more direct) path to memory, so you may avoid a bottleneck that you would ...

23

The assumption underlying such model is the same as lots of other models for skin rendering; the subsurface scattering can be approximated as a diffusion phenomenon. This is good because in highly scattering media, the distribution of light loses dependency from the angle and tends to isotropy. The dipole approximation is a formulation for the resolution ...

22

Overview The main reason for Virtual Texturing (VT), or Sparse Virtual Textures, as it is sometimes called, is as a memory optimization. The gist of the thing is to only move into video memory the actual texels (generalized as pages/tiles) that you might need for a rendered frame. So it will allow you to have much more texture data in offline or slow ...

16

"Physically based" is not a very well defined term, so it's difficult to answer this question exactly. In general, "physically based" refers to the fact that the algorithm in question is derived from physically based principles. It's not physically correct (because we can't afford that) and some approximations usually have to be made, but it's well known ...

16

I'm sadly not able to add a comment to the answer above (not enough reputation), so I will do it like this. I'd like to point out that what Dragonseel describes is simply an integral equation (specifically a Fredholm equation of the second kind). There are many such equations which do have an analytic solution; even some forms of the rendering equation have ...

15

Yes, but you need a paradigm shift. What you are accustomed is called forward rendering. You submit your geometry and then you proceed immediately with the shading pass. In the basic forward rendering you can either loop inside the shader for each light or perform one pass per light and blend the result together (with additive blending). But things have ...

13

John has already written a great answer so consider this answer an extension of his. I'm currently working a lot with compute shaders for different algorithms. In general, I've found that compute shaders can be much faster than their equivalent pixel shader or transform feedback based alternatives. Once you wrap your head around how compute shaders work, ...

13

The rendering equation is as follows: Now, the integral is over the sphere around the point $x$. You integrate over some attenuated light, incoming from every direction. But how much light comes in? This is the light $L(x',\omega_i)$ that some other point $x'$ reflects in the direction $\omega_i$ of point $x$. Now you have to calculate how much light that ...

13

Talking about Linear RGB must be avoided because it does not tell you anything about the RGB colourspace intrinsics, i.e., Primaries, Whitepoint and Colour Component Transfer Functions. A few years ago, assuming it was sRGB was middling but nowadays with DCI-P3 and BT.2020 being very common, it must be ruled out. The ideal gamut for rendering is the one ...

12

Virtual Texturing is the logical extreme of texture atlases. A texture atlas is a single giant texture that contains textures for individual meshes inside it: Texture atlases became popular due to the fact that changing textures causes a full pipeline flush on the GPU. When creating the meshes, the UVs are compressed/shifted so that they represent the ...

12

I would trust Pharr and Humphreys on this. Equation 2 also agrees with the SIGGRAPH Physically Based Rendering course notes, as well as with equation 20 in the Walter et al paper that introduced the GGX distribution. I've read somewhere that there is an error in the original Cook-Torrance paper that led them to miss the factor of 4 in the denominator, which ...

11

In general, when you render an object in an immediate mode—issuing line drawing commands for instance—you build up a series of commands that you submit to the graphics card to draw. If you're drawing a lot of data, or drawing very frequently, you can waste a lot of time sending this data over and over again. A vertex buffer allows you to produce a single ...

11

A set of techniques to avoid explicit ordering go under the name of Order Independent Transparency (OIT for short). There are lots of OIT techniques. Historically one is Depth Peeling. In this approach you first render the front-most fragments/pixels, then you find the closest to the one found in the previous step and so forth, going on with as many "...

11

Light that is blocked will mean that $L(p*, -w_i)$ under the integral is 0 plus how much light the blocking object itself reflects. In other words the shadowing is embedded in the incoming light function.

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There are two steps that make the VBO more efficient than immediate mode. Immediate mode (glBegin/glEnd, glVertex*, etc.) means that at each frame, you spoon feed the vertices, attribute per attribute (position, normal, color, etc.), to the driver, which then reformats them and finally sends the whole package as a command to the GPU. That a lot of function ...

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If the surfaces are exactly co-planer, your fate is up to the FPU gods; you'll more than likely have Z-fighting. If the triangles are identical and you do the exact same math to each, you will end up with the same Z-values for both. But again, this will only happen if your math operations are identical for both. (Since, in general, FPU operations are not ...

10

Image 1: A bad case of shadow acne. (Synthetic and a bit exaggerated) Shadow acne is caused by the discrete nature of the shadow map. A shadow map is composed of samples, a surface is continuous. Thus, there can be a spot on the surface where the discrete surface is further than the sample. The problem does persist even if you multi sample, but you can ...

10

Using an 'ambient light' term in your lighting calculations is an approximation of the indirect light reflected around the scene. Usually it's up to the artist to choose an appropriate value. There isn't really a formula, because the indirect light is dependent on many factors: Light intensity Light shape The BRDFs of the surfaces the light will bounce off ...

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

The main difference would be that with OpenGL in let's say a video game you will have a process called rasterization which basically takes care of determining what part of the scene you see. It needs to be fast so we can experience it as realtime. Therefore the algorithm does a few simple steps. check if a certain part of the scene is in my view frustum ...

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Avoid stereo when possible There was some research published recently measuring when users can or cannot tell whether the specular contribution, which is view point dependent, is different between eyes. Perception of Highlight Disparity at a Distance in Consumer Head-Mounted Displays In the future, this could be use to share some computation between the ...

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There is one important distinction to make. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (such as Metropolis Light Transport) methods fully acknowledge the fact that they produce lots of highly correlated, it is actually the backbone of the algorithm. On other hand there are algorithms as Bidirectional Path Tracing, Many Light Method, Photon Mapping where the crucial role ...

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

As mentioned in this answer, Physically-Based Rendering isn't a set number of things. It's a concept. It's akin to saying something is 'Environmentally Friendly'. There are many different techniques to be environmentally friendly and someone can implement those techniques to varying degrees. The same is for PBR. In the end, Physically Based Rendering is ...

8

What you see on reflects is the n-continuity of normals, which are the derivative of positions. -> a G1-only surface would have G0-only normal field, i.e., with sudden change of gradient in the normals (and thus, the reflects), that the eyes can notice. G2 surfaces have G1 normals fields, which is smooth enough for your eyes.

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To my knowledge, there is no easy and analytic way of recovering the energy lost in single-scattering models. The previous techniques precompute the energy loss and reinject it in the BRDF as a diffuse-like component: http://sirkan.iit.bme.hu/~szirmay/scook.pdf http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/layered-sg14/layered.pdf What they propose is energy ...

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I'm not aware of any rendering technology designed specially for fingernails. Just eyeballing it, I would suggest that a combination of subsurface scattering with a relatively smooth glossy specular surface would get you most of the way there. In other words, you could use the same shader as you do for skin, but with different textures and different specular ...

8

As you've understood, the framebuffer is an array in memory that holds all the pixels to display on the screen. On a desktop PC, it's probably special memory on the graphics card, but in a SoC with one memory shared by GPU and CPU, it's probably a normal memory allocation that the display controller uses DMA to read from. The display controller is a piece ...

7

You have to distinguish the text and graphical modes of the graphics board of your machine. In the old days, mostly the text mode was supported. In this mode the board took care of storing the bitmap definition of the characters and displaying them at the current cursor position. All you had to do was to provide the ASCII code of the character (one byte per ...

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