Efficient Scene Appearance Aggregation for Level-of-Detail Rendering

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel volumetric representation called ABSDF for efficient, high-quality level-of-detail rendering of complex 3D scenes, capturing intricate appearance details while reducing computational costs.

Contribution

It presents a new aggregated appearance model with a closed-form factorization that efficiently summarizes scene appearance for LOD rendering, outperforming existing methods.

Findings

Achieves higher quality appearance reproduction than previous scene filtering methods.

Memory and rendering costs are independent of scene complexity.

Provides an efficient pipeline for LoD generation and rendering.

Abstract

Creating an appearance-preserving level-of-detail (LoD) representation for arbitrary 3D scenes is a challenging problem. The appearance of a scene is an intricate combination of both geometry and material models, and is further complicated by correlation due to the spatial configuration of scene elements. We present a novel volumetric representation for the aggregated appearance of complex scenes and an efficient pipeline for LoD generation and rendering. The core of our representation is the Aggregated Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Function (ABSDF) that summarizes the far-field appearance of all surfaces inside a voxel. We propose a closed-form factorization of the ABSDF that accounts for spatially varying and orientation-varying material parameters. We tackle the challenge of capturing the correlation existing locally within a voxel and globally across different parts of the scene. Our method faithfully reproduces appearance and achieves higher quality than existing scene filtering methods while being inherently efficient to render. The memory footprint and rendering cost of our representation are independent of the original scene complexity.