CAREER: Scalable Rendering for Visual Realism in Scale-Complex Scenes

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CAREER: Scalable Rendering for Visual Realism in Scale-Complex ScenesPI: Kavita BalaA fundamental challenge in computer graphics is to create interactive virtual environments that accurately depict the complex natural scenes of the real world. These virtual environments are vital for a wide variety of applications, including e-commerce, education, industrial design and architectural planning, games and movies, safety analysis and virtual training, and cultural heritage. Realistically simulating the visual appearance of the real world is extremely challenging because scenes of interest have complex geometry, material, and lighting interacting across a wide range of physical scales, ranging from millimeter-sized surface bumps to large-scale structure. We call such scenes scale-complex. Current rendering methods are blind to scale, making it infeasible to realistically simulate the complex paths along which light reflects and scatters in such scale-complex scenes. This project develops a novel framework for realistically rendering images of scale-complex scenes. Importantly, the framework supports rich illumination phenomena and rendering effects such as indirect illumination, participating media, subsurface scattering, motion blur, and depth-of-field.For the proposed framework to be scalable, it must perform well even with growing complexity of the scene and of simulated illumination phenomena. This project explores the following new approaches: (a) a unified treatment of all illumination phenomena and rendering effects, (b) novel multiresolution representations coupled with perceptual metrics based on early vision and higher level vision to eliminate computation where it is not visually important, (c) new methods for accurately computing illumination detail as needed, with illumination-driven simplification of geometry and material, and (d) new hybrid CPU/GPU algorithms for interactive performance.