Category: Digital Design of Nature

Level-of-Detail

The procedures discussed in the last chapter, and particularly the efficient ray­tracing implementations, allow for a relatively fast, though sufficiently exact calculation of the light distribution in complex botanical scenes. The perfor­mance of the procedures is here mostly only restricted through the quantities of the data that have to be processed. However, it is not […]

Plant Images Using Radiosity

In the rendering of landscapes, radiosity has so far rarely been used. The enor­mous amount of geometric information causes extreme computing times and needs a huge amount of memory. Soler and Sillion [204] decreased this by integrating hierarchical instancing in radiosity procedures (see Sect. 8.5). hierarchical radiosity ^ With the hierarchical version of the algorithms, […]

Plant Images Using Raytracing

As already mentioned, raytracing is the most widely used method for the sim­ulation of global illumination. With the described spatial division methods and bounding objects, the time-consuming process of the ray query can be opti­mized. Additional optimizations can be reached with special versions of ray­tracing that are described in the following. First two aspects for […]

Occlusion Culling

The term “occlusion culling” defines methods that exclude all the objects hid­den by other objects before the actual image computation. In connection with local rendering methods, these objects are not even transferred to the graphics hardware. In connection with raytracing, these procedures are used to decrease the total complexity of the scene description, and to […]

Bounding Boxes

In raytracing, a great amount of computing time must be spent on the so-called ray query. Here, with each tracing ray, we have to check which object or poly­gon of the scene is hit first. On the other hand, in local illumination models a lot of work is due to the visibility calculation, which defines […]