This thesis presents a way of automatically generating a landscape painting in the artistic style of Bob Ross. First, a relatively simple, yet effective and versatile, painting model is presented. The brushes of the painting model can be used on their own for creative applications or as a lower layer to the software components responsible for automation. Next, the brush strokes and parameters used to automatically paint eight different landscape features, each with its own adjustable attributes and randomized forms, are described. Finally, the placement of all of the automated landscape features required to achieve the layout of one of Bob Ross's landscape paintings is shown.

In the past, ray tracing has been used widely in offline rendering applications since it provided the ability to better capture high quality secondary effects such as reflection, refraction and shadows. Such effects are difficult to produce in a robust, high quality fashion with traditional, real-time rasterization algorithms. Motivated to bring the advantages to ray tracing to real-time applications, researchers have developed better and more efficient algorithms that leverage the current generation of fast, parallel CPU hardware within the past few years. This thesis provides the implementation and design details of a high performance ray tracing solution called ``RTTest'' for standard, desktop CPUs. Background information on various algorithms and acceleration structures are first discussed followed by an introduction to novel techniques used to better accelerate current, core ray tracing techniques. Techniques such as Omni-Directional Packets, Cone Proxy Traversal and Multiple Frustum Traversal are proposed and benchmarked using standard ray tracing scenes. Also, a novel soft shadowing algorithm called Edge Width Soft Shadows is proposed which achieves performance comparable to a single sampled hard shadow approach targeted at real time applications such as games. Finally, additional information on the memory layout, rendering pipeline, shader system and code level optimizations of RTTest are also discussed.

Algorithms are presented that enable the use of vector graphics representations of images in texture maps for 3D real time rendering. Vector graphics images are resolution independent and can be zoomed arbitrarily without losing detail or crispness. Many important types of images, including text and other symbolic information, are best represented in vector form. Vector graphics textures can also be used as transparency mattes to augment geometric detail in models via trim curves. Spline curves are used to represent boundaries around regions in standard vector graphics representations, such as PDF and SVG. Antialiased rendering of such content can be obtained by thresholding implicit representations of these curves. The distance function is an especially useful implicit representation. Accurate distance function computations would also allow the implementation of special effects such as embossing. Unfortunately, computing the true distance to higher order spline curves is too expensive for real time rendering. Therefore, normally either the distance is approximated by normalizing some other implicit representation or the spline curves are approximated with simpler primitives. In this thesis, three methods for rendering vector graphics textures in real time are introduced, based on various approximations of the distance computation. The first and simplest approach to the distance computation approximates curves with line segments. Unfortunately, approximation with line segments gives only C0 continuity. In order to improve smoothness, spline curves can also be approximated with circular arcs. This approximation has C1 continuity and computing the distance to a circular arc is only slightly more expensive than computing the distance to a line segment. Finally an iterative algorithm is discussed that has good performance in practice and can compute the distance to any parametrically differentiable curve (including polynomial splines of any order) robustly. This algorithm is demonstrated in the context of a system capable of real-time rendering of SVG content in a texture map on a GPU. Data structures and acceleration algorithms in the context of massively parallel GPU architectures are also discussed. These data structures and acceleration structures allow arbitrary vector content (with space-variant complexity, and overlapping regions) to be represented in a random-access texture.

Black-and-white imagery is a popular and interesting depiction technique in the visual arts, in which varying tints and shades of a single colour are used. Within the realm of black-and-white images, there is a set of black-and-white illustrations that only depict salient features by ignoring details, and reduce colour to pure black and white, with no intermediate tones. These illustrations hold tremendous potential to enrich decoration, human communication and entertainment. Producing abstract black-and-white illustrations by hand relies on a time consuming and difficult process that requires both artistic talent and technical expertise. Previous work has not explored this style of illustration in much depth, and simple approaches such as thresholding are insufficient for stylization and artistic control. I use the word wholetoning to refer to illustrations that feature a high degree of shape and tone abstraction. In this thesis, I explore computer algorithms for generating wholetoned illustrations. First, I offer a general-purpose framework, “artistic thresholding”, to control the generation of wholetoned illustrations in an intuitive way. The basic artistic thresholding algorithm is an optimization framework based on simulated annealing to get the final bi-level result. I design an extensible objective function from our observations of a lot of wholetoned images. The objective function is a weighted sum over terms that encode features common to wholetoned illustrations. Based on the framework, I then explore two specific wholetoned styles: papercutting and representational calligraphy. I define a paper-cut design as a wholetoned image with connectivity constraints that ensure that it can be cut out from only one piece of paper. My computer generated papercutting technique can convert an original wholetoned image into a paper-cut design. It can also synthesize stylized and geometric patterns often found in traditional designs. Representational calligraphy is defined as a wholetoned image with the constraint that all depiction elements must be letters. The procedure of generating representational calligraphy designs is formalized as a “calligraphic packing” problem. I provide a semi-automatic technique that can warp a sequence of letters to fit a shape while preserving their readability.

Detta examensarbete omfattar konceptutvecklingen av en mättillsats för vattenkranen i köket, vars grundfunktion är att mäta mängden vatten. Syftet med produkten är att ersätta dagens användande av decilitermått vid vattenmätning, då decilitermåttet fortfarande fyller sin funktion inriktar sig arbetet på att utnyttja modern teknik för att med innovativa funktioner hitta nya omedvetna behov. Examensarbetet grundar sig på författarnas egen idé och behov av en sådan produkt, examensarbetet har utförts utan uppdragsgivare med handledning från tekniska högskolan i Jönköping.Rapporten beskriver hur arbetet har fortskridit från en idé till ett färdigt koncept med inriktning på designprocessen. Genomförandet innefattar att ett flertal koncept som har utvecklats med hjälp av metoder så som brainstorming och bygga-testa-metoden för att sedan sållas ut med hjälp av olika urvalsmetoder och resultera i ett slutgiltigt koncept.Det slutgiltiga konceptet resulterade i en mättillsatts som smälter in i det moderna köket. Hela konceptet har designats med målet att form ska följa funktion. Konceptet konstruerades både för att vara lätt att montera och använda. Resultatet av arbetet presenteras med renderingar och en fysisk presentationsmodell. / This report contains the concept development of measure device for a kitchen tap, the basic function is to measure the amount of water. The purpose with this product is to replace the current use of a handheld cup when measuring water, but since the measuring cup still fills its function much of the report is focused on using modern technology with innovative solutions to find unexpected needs. The report is based on the writers own idea and the need for such a product, the report has been conducted without contractor with guidance from School of Engineering at Jönköping University.The report describes how the process of an idea to a finished concept focused on the design process. The implementation involves numerous concepts that have been developed with the help of methods like brainstorming and build-test-method to later be screened of with different methods for screening to result in a final concept.The final concept resulted in a measuring device that blends well in to the modern kitchen. The concept has been developed with the idea that form should follow function. The concept was designed to be both easy to install and to use. The result is presented with renderings and a material presentation model.

Ultrasound (US) volume data is noisy, so traditional methods for direct volume rendering (DVR) are less appropriate. Improved methods or new techniques are required. There are furthermore a high performance requirement and limited pre-processing to be considered in order for it to be used interactively, since the volume data might be time-varying. There exist numerous techniques for improving visual perception of volume rendering, and while some perform well and produce a visually enhanced result, many are designed and compared for use with medical data that has a high signal-to-noise ratio. This master thesis describe and compare recent methods for DVR illumination, in the form of ambient occlusion or direct/indirect lighting from an external light source. New designs and modifications are introduced for efficiently and effectively enhancing the visual quality of DVR with US data. Furthermore, this thesis addresses the issue of how clipping is performed during rendering and for the different illumination techniques, which is commonly used in ultrasound visualization. This diploma work was conducted at Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, NJ where the partially open source framework XIP is developed. The framework was extended further to include modern methods for DVR illumination that are described in detail within this thesis. Finally, presented results show that several methods can be used to visually enhance the visualization within highly interactive frame-rates.

Planet rendering plays an important role in universe visualization and geographic visualization. The recent tools and methods allow better data acquisition, usually with very high resolution. However in computer graphics, there is always the limitation on the resolution of geometry and texture due to numerical imprecision. Not many applications can handle high resolution data effectively. This thesis introduces, Implicit Surface Scene, a level of detail scene management inspired by dynamic coordinate system and SCALEGRAPH™ which change over time depending on the current camera position relative to the planet surface. Our method is integrated into Uniview and allows Uniview to render high resolution planet geometry with dynamic texture composition and with a surface positioning system that does not suffer from precision issue.

We present a framework for generating, compressing and rendering of SurfaceLight Field (SLF) data. Our method is based on radiance data generated usingphysically based rendering methods. Thus the SLF data is generated directlyinstead of re-sampling digital photographs. Our SLF representation decouplesspatial resolution from geometric complexity. We achieve this by uniform samplingof spatial dimension of the SLF function. For compression, we use ClusteredPrincipal Component Analysis (CPCA). The SLF matrix is first clustered to lowfrequency groups of points across all directions. Then we apply PCA to eachcluster. The clustering ensures that the within-cluster frequency of data is low,allowing for projection using a few principal components. Finally we reconstructthe CPCA encoded data using an efficient rendering algorithm. Our reconstructiontechnique ensures seamless reconstruction of discrete SLF data. We applied ourrendering method for fast, high quality off-line rendering and real-time illuminationof static scenes. The proposed framework is not limited to complexity of materialsor light sources, enabling us to render high quality images describing the full globalillumination in a scene.

Detta arbete har gjorts i samarbete med Rikspolisstyrelsen för att ta fram en metod för hur modern medieteknik kan användas för att skapa en ”virtuell brottsplats”. Syftet är att arbetet ska leda till ett förslag till en metod som lämpar sig för att integrera i polisens brottsplatsundersökningar och rättsliga processer, med beaktande av de speciella krav som ställs. Arbetet innehåller två huvuddelar där den första delens utgångspunkt är vad som går att göra med utrustning och teknik som redan finns tillgänglig och den andra delen hur det skulle kunna utvecklas vidare. Till första delen har ett förslag på en metod som kan användas för att utnyttja panoramatekniken, tagits fram. Därför har det också genomförts utvärderingar och tester på befintliga programvaror för att utröna vad som passar syftet bäst. För den andra delen togs en egen lösning fram och implementerades i OpenGL/C++. Denna lösning baseras på laserskanningsdata. Resultatet av denna del är inte en färdig metod som kan börja användas direkt utan mer ett exempel på hur panoramatekniken kan användas till något mer än att bara visa hur en plats ser ut. För att knyta samman projektet med verkligheten har båda dessa delar tillämpats på flera riktiga fall. En slutsats som kan dras av arbetet är att visualiseringar av denna typ är väldigt användbara och till fördel för utredare och åklagare. Det finns mycket kvar att undersöka men det är ingen tvekan om att den här typen av teknik är användbar för detta syfte.

Despite the notable progress in physically-based rendering, there is still a long way to go before we can automatically generate predictable images of biological materials. In this thesis, we address an open problem in this area, namely the spectral simulation of light interaction with human skin, and propose a novel biophysically-based model that accounts for all components of light propagation in skin tissues, namely surface reflectance, subsurface reflectance and transmittance, and the biological mechanisms of light absorption by pigments in these tissues. The model is controlled by biologically meaningful parameters, and its formulation, based on standard Monte Carlo techniques, enables its straightforward incorporation into realistic image synthesis frameworks. Besides its biophysicallybased nature, the key difference between the proposed model and the existing skin models is its comprehensiveness, i. e. , it computes both spectral (reflectance and transmittance) and scattering (bidirectional surface-scattering distribution function) quantities for skin specimens. In order to assess the predictability of our simulations, we evaluate their accuracy by comparing results from the model with actual skin measured data. We also present computer generated images to illustrate the flexibility of the proposed model with respect to variations in the biological input data, and its applicability not only in the predictive image synthesis of different skin tones, but also in the spectral simulation of medical conditions.