Hardware-accelerated computation of radiance transfer coefficients in computer graphics
US7948490B2 · kind B2 · utility
Assignee
Inventors
Key dates
| Filing date | Oct 22, 2003 |
| Grant date | May 24, 2011 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | Mar 30, 2028 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC G)Physics
- CPC primaryG06T15/55
- WIPO fieldComputer technology
- WIPO sectorElectrical engineering
Abstract
A hardware-accelerated process of computing radiance transfer coefficients (such as for use in image rendering based on precomputed radiance transfer (PRT) techniques) is re-ordered as compared to previously known PRT precomputations to iterate over a sampling of directions about an object. The hardware-accelerated process uses a set of textures representing positions and normals for a sampling of points over a modeled object. In iterating over the directions, the process computes the depth of the object in a shadow buffer, then computes a texture of the radiance contribution based on the normal and position textures and depth from the shadow buffer. The resulting radiance contribution textures of the iterated directions are accumulated to produce a texture representing the radiance transfer coefficients of the sampled positions. This enables the process to avoid reduction operations, ray tracing and slow read-back path limitations of graphical processing units.
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.