Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Tessellated Voxelization For Global Illumination Using Voxel Cone Tracing, Sam Thomas Freed

Master's Theses

Modeling believable lighting is a crucial component of computer graphics applications, including games and modeling programs. Physically accurate lighting is complex and is not currently feasible to compute in real-time situations. Therefore, much research is focused on investigating efficient ways to approximate light behavior within these real-time constraints.

In this thesis, we implement a general purpose algorithm for real-time applications to approximate indirect lighting. Based on voxel cone tracing, we use a filtered representation of a scene to efficiently sample ambient light at each point in the scene. We present an approach to scene voxelization using hardware tessellation and compare …

Eulerian On Lagrangian Cloth Simulation, Kyle C. Piddington

Master's Theses

This thesis introduces a novel Eulerian-on-Lagrangian (EoL) approach for simulating cloth. This approach allows for the simulation of traditionally difficult cloth scenarios, such as draping and sliding cloth over sharp features like the edge of a table. A traditional Lagrangian approach models a cloth as a series of connected nodes. These nodes are free to move in 3d space, but have difficulty with sliding over hard edges. The cloth cannot always bend smoothly around these edges, as motion can only occur at existing nodes. An EoL approach adds additional flexibility to a Lagrangian approach by constructing special Eulerian on Lagrangian …

Point-Based Color Bleeding With Volumes, Christopher J. Gibson

Master's Theses

The interaction of light in our world is immensely complex, but with mod-

ern computers and advanced rendering algorithms, we are beginning to reach

the point where photo-realistic renders are truly difficult to separate from real

photographs. Achieving realistic or believable global illumination in scenes with

participating media is exponentially more expensive compared to our traditional

polygonal methods. Light interacts with the particles of a volume, creating com-

plex radiance patterns.

In this thesis, we introduce an extension to the commonly used point-based

color bleeding (PCB) technique, implementing volume scatter contributions. With

the addition of this PCB algorithm extension, we …

Energetic Path Finding Across Massive Terrain Data, Andrew N. Tsui

Master's Theses

Before there were airplanes, cars, trains, boats, or bicycles, the primary means of transportation was on foot. Unfortunately, many of the trails used by ancient travelers have long since been abandoned. We present a software tool which can help visualize and predict where these forgotten trails might lie through the use of a human-centered cost metric. By comparing the paths generated by our software with known historical trails, we demonstrate how the tool can indicate likely trails used by ancient travelers. In addition, this new tool provides novel visualizations to better help the user understand alternate paths, effect of terrain, …