Opacity Light Fields: Interactive Rendering of Surface Light Fields with View-Dependent Opacity

Opacity Light Fields: Interactive Rendering of Surface Light Fields with View-Dependent Opacity

Vlasic D, Pfister H, Molinov S, Grzeszczuk R, and Matusik W.

ACM: Proceedings of the 2003 symposium on Interactive 3D graphics, 2003.

We present new hardware-accelerated techniques for rendering surface light fields with opacity hulls that allow for interactive visualization of objects that have complex reflectance properties and elaborate geometrical details. The opacity hull is a shape enclosing the object with view-dependent opacity parameterized onto that shape. We call the combination of opacity hulls and surface light fields the opacity light field. Opacity light fields are ideally suited for render- ing of the visually complex objects and scenes obtained with 3D photography. We show how to implement opacity light fields in the framework of three surface light field rendering methods: view- dependent texture mapping, unstructured lumigraph rendering, and light field mapping. The modified algorithms can be effectively supported on modern graphics hardware. Our results show that all three implementations are able to achieve interactive or real-time frame rates.