X-M1 & M2R project :
« Sculpting procedural noise
for real-time visualization of astronomical objects»



Advisor

Fabrice NEYRET   - Maverick team, LJK, at INRIA-Montbonnot (Grenoble)



Context

The overall goal of the larger Galaxy project is the real-time walk-through the galaxy with Hubble-like visual quality. Of course we cannot store explicitly the whole galaxy in ultra high-resolution volume of voxels. Procedural noise like Perlin noise allows movies and video game artists to generate on the fly very detailed natural-looking stochastic textures, or even volumetric density fields. Alas they are uneasy to control finely. In particular, many real-world textures are anisotropic (see images above), which requires to specify varying stretch amount and direction everywhere.


Description of the subject

Last year we studied an approach where the volumetric noise texture is mapped inside proxy-shapes, e.g., deformable tubes: the embedding takes care of the variations of direction and stretch (see results). This is promising, but it gets costly to determine the local coordinates in deformed tubes on the fly, especially when the nebula or dust cloud combines many of them; plus not all chunks of dust fields look like tubes. This year we want to explore the precalculation of a volumetric mapping field where (u,v,w) is stored at a the nodes of a low-res 3D grid and tri-linearly interpolated in space, thus defining anisotropic deformations at no cost at render time, with just the volume marching + local Perlin noise evaluation to proceed.
The issue is then how to “paint” this mapping field ( + possibly other parameters ), and to manage the domain bounding information so as to allows multiple curved noise “strokes” + voids in the same volume area. Also we have to estimate the distortion due to the trilinear interpolation, and the cost of either extra resolution or costlier interpolation to avoid it. Exploring the possibilities of animating the mapping field is also an interesting target since these astronomical objects are evolving. This was trivial using the previous approach, but with the present one we have to efficiently reconstruct the mapping field at every frame. Also, the presence of this explicit field settling the noise domains could be used to skip the empty space and accelerate the volume rendering.
Note that the rendering is done on the GPU, usually via GLSL shaders.



Bibliography and examples

Cf links in the description.

Prerequisite