Christophe Schlick

Light warping for enhanced surface depiction

Recent research on the human visual system shows that our perception of object shape relies in part on compression and stretching of the reflected lighting environment onto its surface. We use this property to enhance the shape depiction of 3D objects by locally warping the environment lighting around main surface features. Contrary to previous work, which require specific illumination, material characteristics and/or stylization choices, our approach enhances surface shape without impairing the desired appearance. Thanks to our novel local shape descriptor, salient surface features are explicitly extracted in a view-dependent fashion at various scales without the need of any pre-process. We demonstrate our system on a variety of rendering settings, using object materials ranging from diffuse to glossy, to mirror or refractive, with direct or global illumination, and providing styles that range from photorealistic to non-photorealistic. The warping itself is very fast to compute on modern graphics hardware, enabling real-time performance in direct illumination scenarios. Note: Third-Party Material Attribution Third-party material used in ACM Transactions on Graphics 28(3), Article 25 - Light Warping for Enhanced Surface Depiction, by Vergne, Pacanowski, Barla, Granier, and Schlick - was used without proper attribution. The 3D model used in Figures 1, 3, and 5, as well as in the cover image of this volume of the journal, was downloaded from the Shape Repository of AIM@SHAPE Project (http://shapes.aimatshape.net) and is the property of CNR-IMATI. We regret this oversight.

Radiance Scaling for versatile surface enhancement

We present a novel technique called Radiance Scaling for the depiction of surface shape through shading. It adjusts reflected light intensities in a way dependent on both surface curvature and material characteristics. As a result, diffuse shading or highlight variations become correlated to surface feature variations, enhancing surface concavities and convexities. This approach is more versatile compared to previous methods. First, it produces satisfying results with any kind of material: we demonstrate results obtained with Phong and Ashikmin BRDFs, Cartoon shading, sub-Lambertian materials, and perfectly reflective or refractive objects. Second, it imposes no restriction on lighting environment: it does not require a dense sampling of lighting directions and works even with a single light. Third, it makes it possible to enhance surface shape through the use of precomputed radiance data such as Ambient Occlusion, Prefiltered Environment Maps or Lit Spheres. Our novel approach works in real-time on modern graphics hardware.

Apparent relief: a shape descriptor for stylized shading

Shape depiction in non-photorealistic rendering of 3D objects has mainly been concerned with the extraction of contour lines, which are generally detected by tracking the discontinuities of a given set of shape features varying on the surface and/or the picture plane. In this paper, we investigate another approach: the depiction of shape through shading. This technique is often used in scientific illustration, comics, cartoon animation and various other artwork. A common method consists in indirectly adapting light positions to reveal shape features; but it quickly becomes impractical when the complexity of the object augments. In contrast, our approach is to directly extract a set of shape cues that are easily manipulated by a user and re-introduced during shading. The main problem raised by such an approach is that shape cues must be identified in a continuous way in image space, as opposed to line-based techniques. Our solution is a novel view-dependent shape descriptor called Apparent Relief, which carries pertinent continuous shape cues for every pixel of an image. It consists of a combination of object- and imagespace attributes. Such an approach provides appealing properties: it is simple to manipulate by a user, may be applied to a vast range of styles, and naturally brings levels-of-detail functionalities. It is also simple to implement, and works in real-time on modern graphics hardware.

Growing Least Squares for the Analysis of Manifolds in Scale-Space

We present a novel approach to the multi‐scale analysis of point‐sampled manifolds of co‐dimension 1. It is based on a variant of Moving Least Squares, whereby the evolution of a geometric descriptor at increasing scales is used to locate pertinent locations in scale‐space, hence the name “Growing Least Squares”. Compared to existing scale‐space analysis methods, our approach is the first to provide a continuous solution in space and scale dimensions, without requiring any parametrization, connectivity or uniform sampling. An important implication is that we identify multiple pertinent scales for any point on a manifold, a property that had not yet been demonstrated in the literature. In practice, our approach exhibits an improved robustness to change of input, and is easily implemented in a parallel fashion on the GPU. We compare our method to state‐of‐the‐art scale‐space analysis techniques and illustrate its practical relevance in a few application scenarios.

Least Squares Subdivision Surfaces

The usual approach to design subdivision schemes for curves and surfaces basically consists in combining proper rules for regular configurations, with some specific heuristics to handle extraordinary vertices. In this paper, we introduce an alternative approach, called Least Squares Subdivision Surfaces (LS), where the key idea is to iteratively project each vertex onto a local approximation of the current polygonal mesh. While the resulting procedure haves the same complexity as simpler subdivision schemes, our method offers much higher visual quality, especially in the vicinity of extraordinary vertices. Moreover, we show it can be easily generalized to support boundaries and creases. The fitting procedure allows for a local control of the surface from the normals, making LS3 very well suited for interactive freeform modeling applications. We demonstrate our approach on diadic triangular and quadrangular refinement schemes, though it can be applied to any splitting strategies.

Visualization of point-based surfaces with locally reconstructed subdivision surfaces

Point-based surfaces (i.e. surfaces represented by discrete point sets which are either directly obtained by current 3D acquisition devices or converted from other surface representations) are well designed for multiresolution storage and transmission of complex objects. Unfortunately, visualization of point-based surfaces requires to develop specific rendering techniques (e.g. splatting) as point sets are not well adapted to existing graphics hardware which are optimized for polygonal meshes. In this paper, we propose an efficient reconstruction and visualization technique of point-based surfaces that takes full benefit from the whole optimized pipeline implemented in graphics hardware. The basic idea is to generate a set of independent meshes using a local 2D Delaunay triangulation of the point set. These meshes are then glued together to get a visual continuity by using a subdivision process.

Semi-automatic geometry-driven reassembly of fractured archeological objects

3D laser scanning of broken cultural heritage content is becoming increasingly popular, resulting in large col- lections of detailed fractured archeological 3D objects that have to be reassembled virtually. In this paper, we present a new semi-automatic reassembly approach for pairwise matching of the fragments, that makes it possible to take into account both the archeologists expertise, as well as the power of automatic geometry-driven match- ing algorithms. Our semi-automatic reassembly approach is based on a real-time interaction loop: an expert user steadily specifies approximate initial relative positions and orientations between two fragments by means of a bimanual tangible user interface. These initial poses are continuously corrected and validated in real-time by an algorithm based on the Iterative Closest Point (ICP): the potential contact surface of the two fragments is identi- fied by efficiently pruning insignificant areas of a pair of two bounding sphere hierarchies, that is combined with a k-d tree for closest vertex queries. The locally optimal relative pose for the best match is robustly estimated by taking into account the distance of the closest vertices as well as their normals. We provide feedback to the user by a visual representation of the locally optimal best match and its associated error. Our first results on a concrete dataset show that our system is capable of assisting an expert user in real-time during the pairwise matching of downsampled 3D fragments.

Implicit Brushes for Stylized Line-based Rendering

We introduce a new technique called Implicit Brushes to render animated 3D scenes with stylized lines in realtime with temporal coherence. An Implicit Brush is defined at a given pixel by the convolution of a brush footprint along a feature skeleton; the skeleton itself is obtained by locating surface features in the pixel neighborhood. Features are identified via image‐space fitting techniques that not only extract their location, but also their profile, which permits to distinguish between sharp and smooth features. Profile parameters are then mapped to stylistic parameters such as brush orientation, size or opacity to give rise to a wide range of line‐based styles.

Sketch and paint-based interface for highlight modeling

In computer graphics, highlights capture much of the appearance of light reflection off a surface. They are generally limited to pre-defined models (e.g., Phong, Blinn) or to measured data. In this paper, we introduce new tools and a corresponding highlight model to provide computer graphics artists a more expressive approach to design highlights. For each defined light key-direction, the artist simply sketches and paints the main highlight features (shape, intensity, and color) on a plane oriented perpendicularly to the reflected direction. For other light-and- view configurations, our system smoothly blends the different user-defined highlights. Based on GPU cabilities, our solution allows real-time editing and feedback. We illustrate our approach with a wide range of highlights, with complex shapes and varying colors. This solution also demonstrates the simplicity of introduced tools.

Efficient streaming of 3D scenes with complex geometry and complex lighting

Streaming data to efficiently render complex 3D scenes in presence of global illumination is still a challenging task. In this paper, we introduce a new data structure based on a 3D grid of irradiance vectors to store the indirect illumination appearing on complex and detailed objects: the Irradiance Vector Grid (IVG). This representation is independent of the geometric complexity and is suitable for quantization to different quantization schemes. Moreover, its streaming over network involves only a small overhead compared to detailed geometry, and can be achieved independently of the geometry. Furthermore, it can be efficiently rendered using modern graphics hardwar. We demonstrate our new data structure in a new remote 3D visualization system, that integrates indirect lighting streaming and progressive transmission of the geometry, and study the impact of different strategies on data transfer.