Visibility culling is a fundamental problem of computer graphics, and is of crucial importance for many applications, like game development or architectural design. For example, interactively rendering a model containing hundreds of millions of polygons like the Boeing 777 model shown on the cover page is only possible when invisible parts of the model are "culled" away. Solving the visibility problem has been an important research topic for many years, and countless methods have been proposed. Amazingly, most approaches still have more or less serious issues that prevent their widespread use. Preprocessed visibility solutions attempt to solve the problem in an offline step, but are often slow, lack robustness, and are hard to implement. Online culling algorithms have a lot of potential since they can be used on arbitrary scenes, but they induce an overhead during rendering which is unacceptable for applications that strive for optimal performance. We believe that basic research problems remain unsolved until this day for preprocessed visibility as well as for online culling, and the goal of this project is to tackle and solve the majority of these problems. In order to do this, we have to gain more insight into the complex properties of visibility, which are still not entirely understood. Our proposed methods have applications in various fields, like game development, architectural design, urban visualization, or massive model visualization.

Funding

  • FWF P21130-N13

Research Areas

  • In this area, we concentrate on algorithms that synthesize images to depict 3D models or scenes, often by simulating or approximating the physics of light.

Publications

24 Publications found:
Image Bib Reference Publication Type
2013
Veronica Sundstedt, Matthias Bernhard, Efstathios Stavrakis, Erik Reinhard, Michael WimmerORCID iD
Visual Attention and Gaze Behaviour in Games: An Object-Based Approach
In Game Analytics: Maximizing the Value of Player Data , pages 543-583, April 2013
Article in a Book
2011
Matthias Bernhard, Karl Grosse, Michael WimmerORCID iD
Bi-modal Task Faciliation in a Virtual Traffic Scenario through Spatialized Sound Rendering
ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 8(4):1-22, November 2011.
Journal Paper (without talk)
Matthias Bernhard, Le Zhang, Michael WimmerORCID iD
Manipulating Attention in Computer Games
In Proceedings of the IEEE IVMSP Workshop on Perception and Visual Signal Analysis, pages 153-158. June 2011.
[paper]
Conference Paper
Image Le Zhang
Improving the Visibility of In-Game Advertisements
[poster] [thesis]
Master Thesis
shadows Jirí BittnerORCID iD, Oliver Mattausch, Ari Silvennoinen, Michael WimmerORCID iD
Shadow Caster Culling for Efficient Shadow Mapping
In Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games 2011, pages 81-88. February 2011.
[draft]
Conference Paper
Oliver Mattausch, Daniel Scherzer, Michael WimmerORCID iD
Temporal Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion
In GPU Pro 2, pages 123-142, February 2011
Article in a Book
Michael Präauer, Herbert Moldan
Preparing an Eyetracking Experiment with a Computer Game
Student Project
Daniel Scherzer, Lei Yang, Oliver Mattausch, Diego Nehab, Pedro V. Sander, Michael WimmerORCID iD, Elmar Eisemann
A Survey on Temporal Coherence Methods in Real-Time Rendering
In EUROGRAPHICS 2011 State of the Art Reports, pages 101-126. 2011.
[pdf]
Other Reviewed Publication
Markus Radits
A gaze adaptive HDR image viewer
Student Project
2010
ssao Oliver Mattausch, Daniel Scherzer, Michael WimmerORCID iD
High-Quality Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion using Temporal Coherence
Computer Graphics Forum, 29(8):2492-2503, December 2010.
Journal Paper (without talk)
Matthias Bernhard, Efstathios Stavrakis, Michael WimmerORCID iD
An Empirical Pipeline to Derive Gaze Prediction Heuristics for 3D Action Games
ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 8(1):4:1-4:30, October 2010.
Journal Paper (without talk)
temporal ssao on stanford dragon Oliver Mattausch
Visibility Computations for Real-Time Rendering in General 3D Environments
Supervisor: Michael WimmerORCID iD
Duration: January 2005 — April 2010
[phd]
PhD-Thesis
Stefan Reinalter
Visibility in a real-world cross-platform game engine
[poster] [Thesis]
Master Thesis
Alex Druml, Markus Ernst, Lukas Rössler
Out-of-Core rendering and simplifications for rendering large scenes
Student Project
Albert Julian Mayer
Megatexture
[doc]
Student Project
Markus Ernst, Alex Druml, Lukas Rössler
Implementing out-of-core algorithms
Student Project
Oliver Mattausch
Visibility Algorithms for Real-Time Rendering. Suedwestdeutscher Verlag fuer Hochschulschriften, 2010.
Published Book
Simon Wallner
Comparing SSAO methods in Ogre
[doc]
Student Project
2009
Daniel Scherzer, Michael Schwärzler, Oliver Mattausch, Michael WimmerORCID iD
Real-Time Soft Shadows Using Temporal Coherence
In Advances in Visual Computing: 5th International Symposium on Visual Computing (ISVC 2009), pages 13-24. December 2009.
[Preprint]
Conference Paper
Jirí BittnerORCID iD, Oliver Mattausch, Peter WonkaORCID iD, Vlastimil Havran, Michael WimmerORCID iD
Adaptive Global Visibility Sampling
ACM Transactions on Graphics, 28(3):94:1-94:10, August 2009. [Preprint]
Journal Paper with Conference Talk
Jirí BittnerORCID iD, Oliver Mattausch, Michael WimmerORCID iD
Game-Engine-Friendly Occlusion Culling
In SHADERX7: Advanced Rendering Techniques, pages 637-653, March 2009
Article in a Book
a texture atlas Wolfgang Knecht
Textture-atlases for large scenes
Student Project
Michael Beham, Manuel Hochmayr
Enhancing Vienna Scene
Student Project
Michael WimmerORCID iD
Visibility Computation in Computer Graphics, 2. February 2009- 4. February 2009, Eibiswald, Austria
Invited Talk
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