Tony's Log

The first time when I read chapter 4 "Transforms", the Quaternion part confused me a lot.You may have already read this great article: http://betterexplained.com/articles/a-visual-intuitive-guide-to

I would say my SPH application is ALMOST done. In recent 2 days I finished optical effects of curvature flow using GLSL.Cubemap using GLSLAs the paper titile indicates “Screen-Space”, the first rendering step is to the regular object, and the second

I keep a strong interest for fluid simulation (specifically water simulation) and this is my first implementation for SPH (Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics). This post is the first part of the whole application – SPH framework. 1) Rigid Body model

After a long time of break – break by my GI renderer, I picked up my SPH application again. In recent week, I managed to implement Curvature Flow described in the paper “Screen Space Fluid Rendering with Curvature Flow” (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?

Ambient Occlusion is a relatively new algorithm proposed in recent years. This algorithm can improve the reality of the scenes quite a lot. It considers the occlusion among objects. You can treat it as ambient shadows. Let me post my demo images here: No

As known ‘Fluid Simulation for Computer Graphics’ only emphasizes Eulerian view (fixed grid) and almost no attention is paid on Lagrangian method. For beginners who are more interested in the latter, I recommend one paper on SPH: Particle-Based Fluid Si

This note is for Chapter 8 to 10. Things are getting more interesting in these chapters. Chapter 8 ‘Film & the Imaging Pipeline’ actually elaborates some image processing issues mainly on tone mapping. Tone mapping is not as simple as I thought before(of

In recent two weeks, I finished another two important components of a GI renderer: caustics and texture.[Texture]: I use DevIL as the basic image loading library. DevIL also offers Mipmap building function. I adopt it directly and what I have implement

Chapter 3 (Advection) and Chapter 4 (Incompressibility) are the essence of fluid simulation. Chapter 1 & 2 establish the physical model – Navier-Stokes Equation – these two chapters really elaborate how to make your fluid flowing. Chapter 3 (Advection) st

This is the note for reading Chapter 4 to 7: Intersection acceleration, Color & Radiometry, Camera Models and Sampling & Reconstruction. Chapter 4 and 5 (Intersection acceleration, Color & Radiometry

Instant Radiosity is an interesting GI algorithm. It is simpler and has less jaggies comparing with the Monte-Carlo group of radiosity algorithms. Currently I have implemented it by two passes: the first pass is the traditional ray-tracing algorithm and t

I put a reading notes 1 for this book weeks ago. But at that time I didn’t get the general idea of Fluid Simulation though technical details are digested well (weird!)Someone from Internet suggests

With ray-tracing as the framework, Instant Radiosity is mainly about point lights record and replacing. In my application, point lights are collected in the iterative ray recursion process, and they will be passed into the second pass. No tricks here. Th

According to many papers, about 70%-80% of rendering time is spent on intersections. So the first target to optimize for performance is to accelerate intersections. Due to the parallelism essence of rays, GPU is of course the best choice. After copying a

Blooming is a basic image processing operation, which is an lerp between the blurred(convoluted) values and the original values. Not complex but looks interesting: Another two more interesting image processing techniques are Tone-Mapping and Gamma C

About one year ago I did a project on Bill-Board Cloud (http://blog.youkuaiyun.com/saintony/archive/2010/04/28/5541052.aspx), and the refered paper is [Lacawell06JGT] "Stochastic Billboard Clouds for Interactive Foliage Rendering".I didn't understand the 2nd ste

<br />Geometry clustering is usually useful when an object is supposed to be represented by bill-boards, which is a common technique used in real-time graphics.<br /> <br />There are a bunch of clustering algorithms, and "k-means" is one of them, and a rel

<br />I found it has been exactly one year since I got this book from Amazon, by checking my mark on its cover - Mar. 29 2010.<br /> <br />I would say it deserves an essentially joyful journey of reading it. Unlike "advanced global illumination", this book

My CPU version(C/C++) of Lightcuts (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1073318) has been done right now. It rocks, indeed. (Testing Platform: Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q6700 @2.66 GHz) My initial testing sample: 3 venus model (1418 triangles for eac

The latest update of my GPU-based Volume Rendering Engine: 1. Trilinear Interpolation (smoother images) 2. Ray-tracing Blending (see the nanorod geometry) 3. Image Color-map (Loading regular pictures as the color-map)

Static cube mapping is only several vector calculation in GPU at runtime. But dynamic cube mapping is different. The typical way to do this is to combine an updated static cube-mapping for each frame. The required action is to use camera to take 6 pictures

Here are some pictures of my GPU-based volume rendering engine: Included functions: 1. Anti-Aliasing (not applied in the above picture) 2. Transfer Function on Alpha & Color The highlight is that it reaches an interactive FPS: for 512x512 resolution

nVidia Tesla architecture GPU + CUDA + OpenGL(FBO mapped to CUDA) is probably the best solution framework for Volume Rendering(Ray-casting) Ray-casting is probably the best scenario for parallel computing. More pictures are coming soon!

The primary visualization tool for my Scientific Visualization course this semester is VTK. I would say it is really a great library. It is built on OpenGL and it opens to Java/Python/C++. VTK follows a pipeline architecture. It takes sometime to get acq

I tried Tone-mapping a little bit. The first try I took is the simple “Spatially Varying Nonlinear Scale ” which is a global tone-mapping operator. GLOBAL, means no local contrast information will be handled, each pixel will be processed according to globa

<br />I just realized: for each individual pass of Instant Radiosity, only one bounce of diffuse illumination can be evaluated. (At least true in my current implementation.) So to have a relative complete GI effect, many passes are necessary.<br /> <br />N

PBRT is a widely spread term that represents another notion for ‘global illumination’. (I met the phrase of “physically based calculation of illumination” in the book of “advanced global illumination”

Here’s my building tips for PBRT (Windows 7 32b, MSVC 2008). VS2008 suffers from many building errors since PBRT was originally released using VS2003 – because C/C++ runtime library differs among the

This article will cover all graphical topics that are essential for the ray-tracer.[Light Model] I adopt the OpenGL light model (Phong Model): color = emission(material) + ambient(ligh

 With OpenGL as the graphics API, I utilized CUDA as the performance saviour – Yes, on nVidia video cards, it runs fast like hell. My professor also recommended us another simple but fun tool – DevI

I’m so lucky to find the book of ‘Advanced Global Illumination 2nd’ as my first guidance for studying global illumination. It seems that it is quite a authoritative book for each one who is new to GI

This is the perfect book for CG rookies because: 1. It covers almost all possible topics of CG fundamentals 2. It offers some really great engineering suggestions 3. It has got a perfectly intel

I just finished a book on GPU with CUDA, which is composed by several Chinese authors – I mean, it still suffers from two major common drawbacks of most Chinese technical books:1. listing knowledges

It is said ‘Fundamentals of Computer Graphics’ is widely adopted by many famous US universities as the first book for computer graphics courses. I can understand, that this book really covers a wide r

In CG the common matrix convention is to use Homogeneous Matrix to perform various transformations, which are 4x4 matrices. This is a really basic common sense in CG. But have you ever consider

Curves and Surfaces are critical in computer graphics, especially in graphics modeling. Also it is one of the most difficult areas in graphics since it requires a relative advanced mathematics ability

http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/geometry/polygonise/ http://users.polytech.unice.fr/~lingrand/MarchingCubes/applet.htmlMarching Cube algorithm is a traditional volume-rendering algorithm. T

Before getting started with intensive practical exercises in CG, you need to learn a CG language first. I think OpenGL is the first choice. In a word, I just finished reading the legendary “Open

For dithering: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DitheringFor Floyd-Steinberg Dithering Algorithm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd-Steinberg_dithering  1. I implemented this algorithm by

What is ‘Surface of Revolution’? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_of_revolution What is Beizer Curve? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bezier_curve The latest lab is to compose an interactive