Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Xinguo Liu

Heung-Yeung Shum

Baining Guo

John Michael Snyder

Kun Zhou

Peter-Pike Johannes Sloan

Sing Bing Kang

Li-Yi Wei

Rui Wang

Zhong Ren

Jin Huang

Xiaohan Shi

Bo Sun

A computer implemented method for deforming a 3D polygon mesh using non-linear and linear constraints. The method includes creating a coarse control 3D polygon mesh that completely encapsulates the 3D polygon mesh to be deformed, projecting the deformation energy of the 3D polygon mesh and the constraints of the 3D polygon mesh to the vertices, or subspace, of the coarse control 3D polygon mesh, and determining the resulting deformed 3D polygon mesh by iteratively determining the deformation energy of the subspace. The constraints may be either linear or non-linear constraints, for example, a Laplacian constraint, a position constraint, a projection constraint, a skeleton constraint, or a volume constraint.

Three dimensional polygon mesh deformation using subspace energy projection

The present soft shadowing technique pre-computes visibility of blockers using a log of a spherical harmonic visibility function. These logs can then be accumulated and exponentiated in real-time to yield the product visibility vector over all the blockers. The product visibility vector is combined with the light intensity and surface reflectance to determine shading at a receiver point in a computer-generated scene.

Soft shadows in dynamic scenes

A system and process for determining the similarity in the shape of objects is presented that generates a novel shape representation called a directional histogram model. This shape representative captures the shape variations of an object with viewing direction, using thickness histograms. The resulting directional histogram model is substantially invariant to scaling and translation. A matrix descriptor can also be derived by applying the spherical harmonic transform to the directional histogram model. The resulting matrix descriptor is substantially invariant to not only scaling and translation, but rotation as well. The matrix descriptor is also robust with respect to local modification or noise, and able to readily distinguish objects with different global shapes. The typical applications of the directional histogram model and matrix descriptor include recognizing 3D solid shapes, measuring the similarity between different objects and shape similarity based object retrieval.

System and process for generating representations of objects using a directional histogram model and matrix descriptor

Large mesh deformation using the volumetric graph Laplacian is described. In one aspect, information is received from a user, wherein the information indicates how an original mesh is to be deformed. The original mesh is then deformed based on the information and application of a volumetric differential operator to a volumetric graph generated from the original mesh.

Large mesh deformation using the volumetric graph Laplacian

The described systems and methods are directed at interactively rendering graphics using precomputed radiance transfer (PRT). A reflectance matrix that represents the reflectance of a particular object to be rendered is determined. Source lighting associated with the object is represented using basis functions. The reflectance matrix is factored into view and light components. A raw transfer matrix is determined based, in part, from the factored reflectance matrix and the source lighting. The raw transfer matrix is partitioned to obtain transfer matrices, which are used to render the object. The described systems and methods are capable of rendering glossy objects with well-defined shadows.

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Beijing, China

Xinguo Liu