Rendering 3D volumes using per-pixel displacement mapping

Abstract

Rendering 3D Volumes Using Per-Pixel Displacement Mapping offers a simple and practical solution to the problem of seamlessly integrating many highly detailed 3D objects into a scene without the need to render large sets of polygons or introduce the overhead of an obtrusive scene-graph. This work takes advantage of modern programmable GPU's as well as recent related research in the area of per-pixel displacement mapping to achieve view independent, fully 3D rendering with per-pixel level of detail. To achieve this, a box is used to bound texture-defined volumes. The box acts as a surface to which the volume will be drawn on. By computing a viewing ray from the camera to a point on the box and using that point as a ray origin, the correct intersection with the texture volume can be found using various per-pixel displacement mapping techniques. Once the correct intersection is found, the final color value for the corresponding point on the box can be computed. The technique supports various effects taken both from established raycasting and ray-tracing methods such as reflection, refraction, selfshadowing on models, a simple animation scheme and an efficient method for finding distances through volumes.

Projection Mapping on Arbitrary Cubic Cell Complexes

“…Omnidirectional relief impostors [ABB*07] represent some objects through the combination of a reduced set of relief textures; this combination is rendered with very few artefacts and no apparent deformation from any viewpoint. Risser [Ris07] used a cube as a render window for ray casting an object stored in a texture using the relief mapping algorithm. Techniques for accelerating the ray height field intersection were proposed [Don05, BD06, RSP07] (see [SKU08] for more displacement mapping acceleration techniques on the GPU).…”

Real-time 3D video communication in 3D virtual worlds: Technical realization of a new communication concept

“…The act of sculpting a 2D plane into a 3D object or model is achieved by displacing the individual pixels of the 2D plane into a third plane, called the Z-direction [30]. Relative to the value of the pixels in the grayscale depth map, the corresponding pixels in the 2D plane will be displaced into the Z-direction.…”