Efficient Self-Shadowing Using Image-Based Lighting on Glossy Surfaces

https://www.sohu.com/a/239323394_641165
https://www.cnblogs.com/atyuwen/archive/2010/03/31/ssdo.html
https://blog.csdn.net/toughbro/article/details/8556345

abstract
in this paper we present a novel natural illumination approach for real-time rasterization-based rendering with environment map-based high dynamic range lighting. our approach allows to use all kinds of glossniess values for surfaces, ranging continuously from completely diffuse up to mirror-like glossiness. this is achieved by combing consine-based diffuse, glossy and mirror reflection models in one single lighting model. we approximate this model by filter functions, which are applied to the enviroment map. this results in a fast, image-based lookup for the different glossiness values which gives our technique the high performance that is necessary for real-time rendering. in contrast to existing real-time rasterization-based natural illumination techniques, our method has the capability of handling high gloss surfaces with directional self-occlusion 自我遮蔽.

1. introduction
   in garment design 服装设计 interactive virtual prototyping systems requrie both a fast simulation system and a fast visualization in order to allow a real-time coupling of both. the scenes processed by such systems typically show a dressed character, which is illuminated by an environment. this is an idea scenario for image-based lighting techniques. however, sine self-occlusion and the material properties are important for the perception of the garment, a suitable visualization method must be able to handle self-shadowing of the scene as well as various materials used for the fabrics. as an additional constraint, the visualization must not allocate too much of the system’s computational power to avoid a slowdown of the simulation. when industrial prototype development comes into play, this gets apparent since the quality and accuracy of a virtual prototyping system depends on the ability to simulate high-resolution models.

many-light approaches, which replace the environment map by a set of light sources, create nice self-shadowing results for diffuse reflection models. however, increasing the reflectivity reveals the light sources since they can not capture the high frequency information stored inside the environment map. increasing the number of light sources can slove the problem. however, a large number of light sources, which are required for realistic results, will slow down the rendering process far below an interactive level.

we solve this problem by introducing a novel tunable 可调节的 lighting model combined with an environment map and a directional occlusion 定向遮蔽 technique which directly exploits the information stored in the environment map to prevent an information loss. our lighting model has several advantages. it can handle both low frequency shadows and high frequency enviroments at the same time without introducing additional artifacts. furthermore, it provides a continuous transition between diffuse and reflecting surfaces and supports directional occlusion. our approach requires only little computational effort and does not rely on mesh-based precomputations. in summary, it can be stated that our novel method allows to compute rasterization-based natural illumination with real-time directional occlusion while considering the surface’s glossiness.

2. related work
   the problem we target consists of three parts. first, a model based on a bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) is needed which is capable to handle various material effects. second, natural illumination and directional occlusion of the scene are requried. third, in order to be used in combination with a real-time simulation system, everything which is related to a simulated geometry needs to be computed from scratch 擦伤；抓痕；刮擦声；乱写 in each frame. the technique we present belongs to the category of natural illumination 自然照明技术 techniques, where a scene is illuminated by a distant high dynamic range light source. a good overview of the different methods in this area is given by Ritschel et al. their state-of-the-art 最先进的；已经发展的；达到最高水准的 report provides a good survey over current global illumination techniques. using images of environments in order ot illuminate objects has a long tradition in computer graphics. Environment mapping techniques can be used to simulate a wide set of phenomena in real-time computer graphics. an overview is given by AkenineMoller et al. one application of environment maps is to use them as a lookup for the convolution between a BRDF and the environment map. since a given reflection model can cover a large portion of the environment map, the computation of the convolution is a slow process. To achieve a higher performance Kautz et al. present a multi-resolution approach to speed up the convolution process, which leads to one convolution for a given reflection model. Kautz and McCook approximate a BRDF with an individual set of pre-filtered environment maps convoluted by exponents of cosine-based lobes. our approach is an extension to this work with the novelty that a single environment map can be used to approximate all exponents. this allows us to approximate several BRDFs with the same environment map.

Environment maps can be used in conjunction with high dynamic range (HDR) images in order to capture natural illumination. 自然照明 Debevec presents an acquisition method for such images 获取这个图像的方法 and how they can be used to render scenes under very realistic lighting conditions. This process is called image-based lighting. the tricky 最困难的部分 part for image-based lighting is the integration of self-shadowing of the scene. Contrary to ambient occlusion the enviroment is not a homogenous light source but colored, which makes the incoming light dependent of its direction. 与环境遮挡相反，环境不是均匀的光源，而是彩色的，这使得入射光依赖于它的方向。这与环境遮蔽有什么关系？？？？ However, often image-based lighting and ambient occlusion are combined, effectively splitting up the lighting and the shadow computations. for real-time applications this can be done by a set of lights generated by an importance sampling of the environement map. examples of this are given in [Deb08, ADM*08]. lighting and shadow computations can be split her, too like it is presented by DeCoro and Rusinkiewicz.

However, all current approaches in this area do not perform well with highly glossy surfaces. the reason for this is that the all-frequency information of the environment map is substituted with a compressed one. using highly glossy surfaces will reveal the compressed information, which is given by single light sources. Annen et al. reduce this problem by using area light sources. however, these light sources still represent one constant value over an area, not revealing the full environment map information in case of highly glossy surfaces.

our approach circumvents规避了this problem by using the original environment map in the illumination computation. this allows us to use the original all-frequency 全频率的 information of the light probe. to support the usage of shadowing techniques, e.g., we substitute the environment map by a set of light sources. Annen et al. show that shadowing technique requires soft shadowing and a fitting penumbra computation in order to obtain a smooth transition between the shadows of the single light sources. in the work of Dong et al. this technique is extended to virtual point lights in conjunction with clustering in order to achieve interactive indirect illumination of diffuse scenes. these exist various soft shadowing techniques for real-time rendering, which have all their advantages and disadvantages. A survey of suitable methods is given in[KS14].

Recently, screen space methods have been developed which address ambient and birectional occlusion computations （SSAO SSDO）. these methods have the big advantage to be independent of the scene complexity. screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO) was first discuss by Cryteck [Mit07] and used in their vedio game Crysis 孤岛危机. since its introduction numerous extensions and contributions in order to improve it were developed [RGS09, KERS11, BKB13]. an extension of SSAO towards directional occlusion is presented by Ritschel et al. Klehm et al. present an alternative approach, which samples an environment map within a cone approximating the area the surface sees from the environment map. this is similar to our used scheme. however, the sampling process still needs to be performed per pixel with multiple lookups into the environment map to get the area information for the visible portion of the map. such techniques mainly rely on depth information of the current view for their computations. this is problematic since cavities 凹处 are ignored, which are hidden in the current view. thus, the whole scene does not contribute to the occlusion and the deviations 偏差 from a ground truth differ more and more for the low frequency shadowing effects 低频阴影.

3. concept
   our main goal is to achieve natural lighting for real-time rendering with directional occlusion, not only for diffuse and low gloss surfaces but also for high glossiness up to mirror like surfaces.

we identified two main problems of existing methods that we must address at the same time to reach this goal. first, the necessity to use all information of the environment map for the lighting process. existing methods substitute the environment map with a set of light sources which is problematic when dealing with high gloss surfaces and limits the algorithms to diffuse and low gloss surfaces. in constrast to previous methods we use the full image information of the environment map in the lighting process and compute only shadows with a set of virtual point light sources. this allows us to handle high gloss surfaces without problems. second, a lighting model is required which supports a smooth transition between diffuse and mirror like glossiness. to meet this requirement we propose a lighting model based on a filtering of the environment maps.

the basic outline of our new algorithm is:

1. subdivide the original environment map into discrete regions and create a placeholder light source for each region (see section 3.1). in this way we will do the occlusion computations for the self-occlusion of the scene.
2. filter the generated discrete regions with our proposed method to get a lookup for the lighting model (see section 3.2). we call the resulting filtered maps partial environment maps (PEM). this filtering allows us to use the PEMs as a direct lookup table for the lighting already including the glossiness of the materials. the novelty of this approch is that the lighting information is not only stored for a direction but also for a given glossines value.
3. use shadow mapping to get the visibility information for every light source providing information about the sence’s self-occlusion (see section 3.3).
4. determine the color for each pixel by combining the visibility information of the shadow maps with the color information of the (filtered) enviroment maps (see section 3.4). this concludes the algorithm by combining occlusion values with their corresponding light information. since this light information already contains the glossiness term of the material system, the result is a value containing material properties, occlusion and the lighting information of the whole environment map.