Pixar

Jacob Porter Merrell

Apurva Shah

Alexis Angelidis

Philip Child

Robert Moyer

Particular embodiments comprise providing a surface mesh for an object, generating a voxel grid comprising volumetric masks for the mesh, and generating a lit mesh, wherein the lit mesh comprises a shaded version of the mesh as positioned in a scene. The voxel grid may be positioned over the lit mesh in the scene, and a first ray may be traced to a position of the voxel grid. If the traced ray passed through the voxel grid and hit a location on the lit mesh, then one or more second rays may be traced to the hit location on the lit mesh. If the traced ray hit a location in the voxel grid but did not hit a location on the lit mesh, then one or more second rays may be traced from the hit location in the voxel grid to the closest locations on the lit mesh. Finally, color sampled at one or more locations proximate to the position of the voxel grid may be blurred outward through the voxel grid to create a volumetric projection.

Generating a volumetric projection for an object

Shading attributes for scene geometry are predetermined and cached in one or more alternate scene representations. Lighting, shading, geometric, and/or other attributes of the scene may be precalculated and stored for at least one of the scene representations at an appropriate level of detail. Rendering performance is improved generally and for a variety of visual effects by selecting between alternate scene representations during rendering. A renderer selects one or more of the alternate scene representations for each of the samples based on the size of its filter area relative to the feature sizes or other attributes of the alternate scene representations. If two or more alternate scene representations are selected, the sampled values from these scene representations may be blended. The selection of scene representations may vary on a per-sample basis and thus different scene representations may be used for different samples within the same image.

Growing community of inventors

El Sobrante, CA, United States of America

Jacob Porter Merrell