Pixar

Maxwell E Planck

John R Anderson

Erin Tomson

Timothy S Milliron

Michael Kass

David Laur

Najeeb Tarazi

Yasmin Khan

Erik Smitt

User interface display layouts are provided that draw a user's attention to a specific element or elements by de-emphasizing the surrounding content, but without removing the de-emphasized content from the interface. This ability to maintain the whole presentable layout with visibility layers and without layout changes provides a useful navigation experience for the user as it is clear where the user's attention should go and yet the surrounding content is still subtly there, constantly reminding the user of the other available content. De-emphasis of certain content items is achieved by modifying display characteristics of those content items relative to a base display level, for example by lowering saturation, lowering opacity, and/or de-focusing (as if the user is looking through a camera) and modification can be done variably. Driven by a relevancy score, each content item in a display layout can be de-emphasized more or less depending on which content is more meaningful to the user's filtering actions.

Variable de-emphasis of displayed content based on relevance score

Programmable or user-defined visibility functions can be defined to achieve rendering effects and eliminate rendering errors. A renderer traverses the set of geometry samples potentially visible to an image sample. Rather than accumulate opacity and color in strict depth order, the renderer can invoke visibility functions associated with some or all of the geometry samples. Each geometry sample's visibility function can access attributes of any other geometry sample associated with the image sample. Furthermore, each geometry sample's visibility function can identify the position of its associated geometry sample and any other geometry samples in the depth sequence of geometry samples associated with an image sample. A visibility function can return any arbitrary value based on attributes of its associated geometry sample, attributes of other geometry samples associated with the image sample, and/or the position of geometry samples in the depth sequence associated with the image sample.

Programmable visible surface compositing

A computer system method includes determining a first surface illumination on an object based upon a respective irradiance, determining a first surface reflection based upon the respective irradiance, determining a second surface illumination on the object based upon a respective irradiance, determining a second surface reflection based upon the respective irradiance, receiving a first weighting for the first illumination and the first reflection value, and a second weighting for the second illumination and the second reflection value, wherein the weightings are different, determining a first surface illumination in response to the first illumination value, the first reflection, and the first weighting, determining a second surface illumination in response to the second illumination value, the second reflection, and the second weighting, and determining an image including the object based on the first surface illumination and the second surface illumination.

Translucent object rendering methods and apparatus

A method for a computer system includes receiving a three-dimensional model of an object, wherein the object includes a surface region, determining an incident irradiance associated with the surface region, determining a plurality of voxels associated with the three-dimensional model of the object, wherein a first plurality of voxels is associated with the surface region, and wherein a second plurality of voxels is associated with a sub-surface region of the object, associating the incident irradiance with the second plurality of voxels, and determining a subsurface scattering contribution associated with the surface region of the object in response to the incident irradiance associated with the second plurality of voxels.

Subsurface rendering methods and apparatus

The effective illumination volume (e.g., angular spread and falloff) of each light source in an object model scene can be represented by a simple geometry. Geometry-based culling techniques then can be used to automatically remove or de-activate lights for a frame, set of frames, or entire shot of animation, based on interactions of the light geometries with objects in the scene. The light pruning process can be run in a pre-pass procedure, such that production and rendering preparation procedures do not have to deal with lights that will not affect a final image. Further, a pre-pass pruning removes lights before rendering, such that the data for each light does not have to be loaded into memory at render time. Removing the lights before rendering also can reduce a amount of ray tracing and other processing used for the lights at render time.

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Oakland, CA, United States of America

Maxwell E Planck