Bilkent University
Department of Computer Engineering

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MS THESIS PRESENTATION

 

Real-Time Prediction Based Snow And Rain Accumulation in Virtual Environments

 

Nail Akıncı
MS Student
(Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Bülent Özgüç)
Computer Engineering Department
Bilkent University

Although weather effects have been developed thoroughly in offline renderings, their computational costs exceed current hardware to run them in real-time. Therefore, less expensive methods are developed. Still, in many real-time applications, weather conditions are prepared by artists for each environment independently because developers do not want to compromise performance over simulated weather. The main reason of this is current developed algorithms use most of the graphical processing power just for weather effects in a relatively small scale scene. At the end, they become unusable in real scenario, because weather conditions are only one part of the overall system. Therefore, in the proposed approach, all weather conditions are executed based on prediction, where its computational cost is negligible, under 1 ms on current generation hardware. Prediction is done based on many factors such as orientation, height and position on terrain and global wind and sun direction. Appearance of weather conditions are generated from original textures of the objects then compared and re-adjusted to achieve similar values of real life scanned (Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function) BRDF data. All computation is done on GPU to be used with (Physically Based Rendering) PBR approach. Even though all changes are made based on prediction and textures are generated, at the end, results are comparable to weather conditions in real life.

 

DATE: 5 September 2016, Monday @ 10:00
PLACE: EA-409