Memory Efficient Billboard Clouds for BTF Textured Objects
Abstract
Efficiently rendering highly structured models distant from the viewer constitutes a difficult task since the geometric complexity has to be reduced extremely while simultaneously preserving the overall visual quality. Recently, billboard clouds have been introduced as an new solution to this problem. They achieve acceptable performance by coarsely approximating the geometry of a model while storing surface details as textures. Yet, important surface detail due to self-shadowing, reflectance properties and changing silhouettes is lost.
In this paper we introduce Bidirectional Texture Function (BTF) textured billboard clouds which drastically increase the visual quality by preserving view- and light-dependent effects like reflection properties, changing silhouette and changing shadows while preserving the fast rendering performance. In order to utilize the gains of BTFs, we propose two new methods for generation of memory efficient billboard clouds optimized for connected and unconnected models that preserve the normals of the model much better than previous approaches.
Keywords: appearance, geometry, level of detail, reflection properties
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Bibtex
@INPROCEEDINGS{meseth-2004-memory,
author = {Meseth, Jan and Klein, Reinhard},
editor = {Girod, B. and Magnor, M. and Seidel, H.-P.},
pages = {167--174},
title = {Memory Efficient Billboard Clouds for BTF Textured Objects},
booktitle = {Vision, Modeling, and Visualization 2004},
year = {2004},
month = nov,
publisher = {Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Aka GmbH, Berlin},
keywords = {appearance, geometry, level of detail, reflection properties},
abstract = {Efficiently rendering highly structured models distant from the viewer constitutes a difficult task
since the geometric complexity has to be reduced extremely while simultaneously preserving the
overall visual quality. Recently, billboard clouds have been introduced as an new solution to this
problem. They achieve acceptable performance by coarsely approximating the geometry of a model while
storing surface details as textures. Yet, important surface detail due to self-shadowing,
reflectance properties and changing silhouettes is lost.
In this paper we introduce Bidirectional Texture Function (BTF) textured billboard clouds which
drastically increase the visual quality by preserving view- and light-dependent effects like
reflection properties, changing silhouette and changing shadows while preserving the fast rendering
performance. In order to utilize the gains of BTFs, we propose two new methods for generation of
memory efficient billboard clouds optimized for connected and unconnected models that preserve the
normals of the model much better than previous approaches.},
isbn = {3-89838-058-0},
conference = {The 9th International Fall Workshop Vision, Modeling and Visualisation 2004}
}