• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.16 no.12
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• pp.1165-1176
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• 2010

In order to realistically visualize such participating media as cloud, smoke, and gas, the light transport process must be physically simulated inside the media. While it is known that this process is well described physically through the volume rendering equation, it usually takes a great deal of computation time for obtaining high-precision solutions. Recently, GPU-based, fast rendering methods have been proposed for the realistic simulation of participating media, however, there still remain several problems to be resolved. In this article, we describe our rendering techniques applied to enhance the performances and features of our GPU-assisted participating media renderer, and analyze how such efforts have actually improved the renderer. The presented techniques will be effectively used in volume renderers for creating various digital contents in the special effects industries.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.27-35
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• 2015

This study presents a volume rendering method using ambient occlusion which is one of global illumination methods. By considering the volume density distribution as normal distribution, ambient occlusion can be calculated at real-time speed regardless of modification of opacity transfer function. We calculate and store the averages and standard deviations of densities in a block centered at each voxel in pre-processing time. In rendering process, we determine the illumination value by estimating the nearby opacity. We generalized theoretical model and generated better quality images improving our previous research. In detail, various shapes of transfer function can be used due to the proposed equation model. Moreover, we introduced a multi-range model to give nearer objects more weight. As the result, more realistic volume rendering image can be generated at real-time speed by mixing local and ambient occlusion shading.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.29-38
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• 2005

The fluid animation procedure consists of physical simulation and visual rendering. In the physical simulation of fluids, the most frequently used practices are the numerical simulation of fluid particles using particle dynamics equations and the continuum analysis of flow via Wavier-Stokes equation. Particle dynamics method is fast in calculation, but the resulting fluid motion is conditionally unrealistic The method using Wavier-Stokes equation, on the contrary, yields lifelike fluid motion when properly conditioned, yet the complexity of calculation restrains this method from being used in real-time applications. Global illumination is generally successful in producing premium-Duality rendered images, but is also excessively slow for real-time applications. In this paper, we propose a rapid fluid animation method incorporating enhanced particle dynamics simulation method and pre-integrated volume rendering technique. The particle dynamics simulation of fluid flow was conducted in real-time using Lennard-Jones model, and the computation efficiency was enhanced such that a small number of particles can represent a significant volume. For real-time rendering, pre-integrated volume rendering method was used so that fewer slices than ever can construct seamless inter-laminar shades. The proposed method could successfully simulate and render the fluid motion in real time at an acceptable speed and visual quality.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Visualization
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.8-15
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• 2004

With all the recent progresses in computer hardware and software technology, the animation of fluids in real-time is still among the most challenging issues of computer graphics. The fluid animation is carried out in two steps - the physical simulation of fluids immediately followed by the visual rendering. The physical simulation is usually accomplished by numerical methods utilizing the particle dynamics equations as well as the fluid mechanics based on the Navier-Stokes equations. Particle dynamics method is usually fast in calculation, but the resulting fluid motion is conditionally unrealistic. The methods using Navier-Stokes equation, on the contrary, yield lifelike fluid motion when properly conditioned, yet the complexity of calculation restrains this method from being used in real-time applications. This article presents a rapid fluid animation method by using the continuum-based fluid mechanics and the enhanced particle dynamics equations. For real-time rendering, pre-integrated volume rendering technique was employed. The proposed method can create realistic fluid effects that can interact with the viewer in action, to be used in computer games, performances, installation arts, virtual reality and many similar multimedia applications.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.7-18
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• 2008

To realistically produce fluids such as smoke for the visual effects in the films or animations, we need two main processes: a physics-based modeling of smoke and a rendering of smoke simulation data, based on light transport theory. In the computer graphics community, the physics-based fluids simulation is generally adopted for smoke modeling. Recently, the interest of the particle-based Lagrangian simulation methods is increasing due to the advantages at simulation time, instead of the grid-based Eulerian simulation methods which was widely used. As a result, because the smoke rendering technique depends heavily on the modeling method, the research for rendering of the particle-based smoke data still remains challenging while the research for rendering of the grid-based smoke data is actively in progress. This paper focuses on realistic rendering technique for the smoke particles produced by Lagrangian simulation method. This paper introduces a technique which is called particle map, that is the expansion and modification of photon mapping technique for the particle data. And then, this paper suggests the novel particle map technique and shows the differences and improvements, compared to previous work. In addition, this paper presents irradiance map technique which is the pre-calculation of the multiple scattering term in the volume rendering equation to enhance efficiency at rendering time.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.9-20
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• 2010

In order to visualize participating media in 3D space, they usually calculate the incoming radiance by subdividing the ray path into small subintervals, and accumulating their respective light energy due to direct illumination, scattering, absorption, and emission. Among these light phenomena, scattering behaves in very complicated manner in 3D space, often requiring a great deal of simulation efforts. To effectively simulate the light scattering effect, several approximation techniques have been proposed. Volume photon mapping takes a simple approach where the light scattering phenomenon is represented in volume photon map through a stochastic simulation, and the stored information is explored in the rendering stage. While effective, this method has a problem that the number of necessary photons increases very fast when a higher variance reduction is needed. In an attempt to resolve such problem, we propose a different approach for rendering particle-based volume data where kernel smoothing, one of several density estimation methods, is explored to represent and reconstruct the light in-scattering effect. The effectiveness of the presented technique is demonstrated with several examples of volume data.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.163-170
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• 2010

Multi-planar reformatting(MPR) is a volume rendering technique which generates images of sectional planes users define, so that it is essential for medical imaging system. Due to the recent advances of medical imaging system, users require to place plural planes on a single dataset and to enable an individual and easy control for each plane. In this paper, we enumerate various user operations for recent MPR and analyze user requirements to update the plane equation. For the effective control of coordinate system, each plane is considered in a separated coordinate system and all informations which form a coordinate system are grouped into two components: the individual components and the common components. The proposed system is implemented on a graphics hardware, so that it smoothly performs MPR including recent requirements.