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Doctor Thesis
Personal Note
The thesis is mainly a collection of the papers:
Geometry of Real Time Shadows,
GPU Radiosity for Triangular Meshes with Support of Normal Mapping and Arbitrary Light Distributions,
Geometry of Arbitrary Light Distributions,
An Extended GPU Radiosity Solver Including Diffuse and Specular Reflectance and Transmission (this is a
slightly different version as the one published in The Visual Computer) and
Force Directed Embedding of Hierarchical Cluster Graphs
Abstract
Computer image generation has been driven by two major factors: realism and interactivity.
Whereas the former led to various global illumination algorithms to solve
the problem of light interreflection as accurately as possible the latter motivated
algorithms for the fast generation of shadows for direct illumination environments.
Computing a global illumination solution is an inherently difficult task, since solutions
to integral equations which express the transport of radiance in a recursive
manner have to be computed and therefore requires expensive computation times
for sophisticated solutions.
Modern graphics hardware and their programmable shading units along with the
fact that GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) are scaling well beyond Moores Law,
prompted researches to adopt, or at least accelerate, some popular graphics algorithms,
like raytracing and radiosity, to the parallel architecture of GPUs.
The research summarized in this thesis was motivated by the above mentioned
factors. One part of this thesis is devoted to the description of an extended GPU
radiosity solver for triangular meshes, which is also capable of handling diffuse transmission
as well as multiple ideal specular reflections and transmissions. Adaptive
subdivision is used to increase the accuracy of the radiosity solution. For this purpose
a new technique, which uses hardware occlusion queries to determine shadow
boundaries in image space, is proposed. Furthermore the concept of light distribution
textures to incorporate goniometric light sources into the radiosity process, is
introduced.
The adaptability of these textures to real-time environments and for the simulation
of effect lights is discussed along with a shadow volume algorithm for the creation
of shadow profiles in the second major part which deals with
Download
The thesis is available
here (16.7 Mb).
If you are only interested in one of the papers please download them seperately.
