Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Microsoft Corporation

Yanyun Chen

Baining Guo

Heung-Yeung Shum

Ying-Qing Xu

Stephen S Lin

Xin Tong

Lin Liang

John Michael Snyder

Kun Zhou

Jiaping Wang

Ying Hua Song

Steve Lin

Interactive relighting with dynamic reflectance involves relighting a graphical scene with dynamic changes to the reflectance(s) in the graphical scene. A graphical scene may include source radiance, regions having reflectances, a surface spot, incident radiation from the source radiance at the surface sport, an incident direction, a viewing direction, exit radiance, and so forth. In an example embodiment, a graphical scene is relighted based on at least one adjusted reflectance of the graphical scene using an incident radiance at a surface spot that is separated into respective incident radiance components corresponding to different respective numbers of interreflections in the graphical scene. In another example embodiment, a graphical scene is relighted based on at least one adjusted reflectance of the graphical scene using a tensor representation for a reflectance of a surface spot with the tensor representation being segmented into three adjustable factors for lighting, viewing, and reflectance.

Interactive relighting with dynamic reflectance

A shell radiance texture function (SRTF) is defined to record an outgoing radiance from a base volume of an object to be rendered. Using the SRTF, radiance values are precomputed and stored for the base volume. The object is rendered using the precomputed radiance values.

Shell radiance texture function

An exemplary computer-implementable method includes providing a computer-generated object wherein the object has characteristics, emitting a computer-generated particle, determining if the particle interacts with the object and, if the particle interacts with the object, altering one or more of the characteristic of the object wherein the altering simulates weathering or aging of the object. Various other exemplary techniques are also disclosed.

Visual simulation of weathering by y-ton tracing

A method and system for implementing capturing and rendering geometric details for mesostructure surfaces is described herein. A mesostructure distance function is defined as a function of a given reference point and a given viewing direction. A distance from a reference point to a mesostructure surface point along a viewing direction is measured using the mesostructure distance function. This distance is used to determine the visibility of mesostructure surface for rendering silhouettes. The lighting visibility of the mesostructure surface point may also be determined and used for determining whether the mesostructure surface point is in shadow. This determination may then be used for rendering shadow silhouettes.

Capturing and rendering geometric details

Techniques are provided for at least modeling any one of mesostructure shadowing, masking, interreflection and silhouettes on a surface, as well as subsurface scattering within a non-homogeneous volume. Such techniques include, at least, acquiring material parameters for a material sample, determining irradiance distribution values for the material sample, synthesizing the material sample onto a mesh of an object. The synthesized object may then be rendered by one of plural rendering techniques.

Shell texture functions

A method and system for efficient synthesis of photorealistic free-form knitwear, where a single cross-section of yarn serves as the basic primitive for modeling entire articles of knitwear. This primitive, called the lumislice, describes radiance from a yarn cross-section based on fine-level interactions, including occlusion, shadowing, and multiple scattering, among yarn fibers. By representing yarn as a sequence of identical but rotated cross-sections, the lumislice can effectively propagate local microstructure over arbitrary stitch patterns and knitwear shapes. This framework accommodates varying levels of detail and capitalizes on hardware-assisted transparency blending. To further enhance realism, a technique for generating soft shadows from yarn is also introduced.

Macrostructure modeling with microstructure reflectance slices

A system and process for adding a photorealistic rendering of a body of water to a virtual 3D scene or image and creating a video therefrom having interactive water effects. A region of water is added to an image by adding an area depicting the original scene as it would appear if reflected by still body of water. Then, the appearance of the added water region is distorted over a series of image frames in such a way as to simulate how the reflected scene would look if the surface of the water were in motion. The water can have dynamic waves and the user can interact with the water in numbers of ways, including generating ripples on the water surface and creating rain. In addition, these effects can be achieved at full screen resolution with the use of the latest graphics hardware by employing a texture shifting technique.

Interactive water effects using texture coordinate shifting

The present invention provides a computer implemented method for placing feathers on a surface. The method includes providing a surface having a plurality of vertices and establishing a growing direction for each of the plurality of vertices on the surface. Feathers are placed on the surface based on the plurality of vertices and the growing direction.

Placing feathers on a surface

The present invention provides a systematic method for rendering feathers. In one aspect, a segment of a rachis having a first barb and second barb is generated. The first barb is generated based on a first barb length and the second barb is generated based on a second barb length.

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Beijing, China

Yanyun Chen