Memory Efficient Billboard Clouds for BTF Textured Objects

Efficiently rendering highly structured models distant from the viewer constitutes a difficult task since the geometric complexity has to be reduced extremely while simultaneously preserving the overall visual quality. Recently, billboard clouds have been introduced as an new solution to this problem. They achieve acceptable performance by coarsely approximating the geometry of a model while storing surface details as textures. Yet, important surface detail due to self-shadowing, reflectance properties and changing silhouettes is lost. In this paper we introduce Bidirectional Texture Function (BTF) textured billboard clouds which drastically increase the visual quality by preserving view- and light-dependent effects like reflection properties, changing silhouette and changing shadows while preserving the fast rendering performance. In order to utilize the gains of BTFs, we propose two new methods for generation of memory efficient billboard clouds optimized for connected and unconnect...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: VMV
• Authors: Jan Meseth, Reinhard Klein
• Keywords: Billboard Clouds, Efficient Billboard Clouds, Visual Quality, VMV 2004, VMV 2008