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IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

Expressive Single Scattering for Light Shaft Stylization

Timothy R. Kol, Oliver Klehm, Hans-Peter Seidel, and Elmar Eisemann

Example of our stylized scattering. Left: physically correct single scattering using the original occluders. The leaves of the tree block most of the light, causing a rather subtle effect. Right: stylized scattering with occluder manipulation. Using our system, an artist can easily add holes into the shadow map of the tree, producing more pronounced scattering effects. While physically incorrect, it is not obvious for the viewer that the right image uses fake occlusion information. Surface shadows are created from the original shadow map.

Light scattering in participating media is a natural phenomenon that is increasingly featured in movies and games, as it is visually pleasing and lends realism to a scene. In art, it may further be used to express a certain mood or emphasize objects. Here, artists often rely on stylization when creating scattering effects, not only because of the complexity of physically correct scattering, but also to increase expressiveness. Little research, however, focuses on artistically influencing the simulation of the scattering process in a virtual 3D scene. We propose novel stylization techniques, enabling artists to change the appearance of single scattering effects such as light shafts. Users can add, remove, or enhance light shafts using occluder manipulation. The colors of the light shafts can be stylized and animated using easily modifiable transfer functions. Alternatively, our system can optimize a light map given a simple user input for a number of desired views in the 3D world. Finally, we enable artists to control the heterogeneity of the underlying medium. Our stylized scattering solution is easy to use and compatible with standard rendering pipelines. It works for animated scenes and can be executed in real time to provide the artist with quick feedback.

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Citation

Timothy R. Kol, Oliver Klehm, Hans-Peter Seidel, and Elmar Eisemann, Expressive Single Scattering for Light Shaft Stylization, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 23, pp. 1753–1766, 2017.

BibTex

@article{bib:kol:2017,
    author       = { Kol, Timothy R. and Klehm, Oliver and Seidel, Hans-Peter and Eisemann, Elmar },    
    title        = { Expressive Single Scattering for Light Shaft Stylization },
    journal      = { IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics },
    volume       = { 23 },
    year         = { 2017 },
    pages        = { 1753--1766 },
    doi          = { 10.1109/TVCG.2016.2554114 },
    dblp         = { journals/tvcg/KolKSE17 },
    url          = { https://publications.graphics.tudelft.nl/papers/236 },
}