CS348b Project Proposal

Andreas Edlund and Tim Chao

Goal:

In our project, we intend to explore techniques in realistically rendering surfaces with fine geometric structures such as grass and fur.

To motivate this, we will try to render a realistic scene of a teddy bear sitting in short grass in an outdoor scene.

Previous Work:

We will use as reference Kajiya and Kay's paper, "Rendering fur with three dimensional textures" in which texels are used to simulate the reflection of light through fur. We hope to apply similar volumetric techniques to our rendering of the grass, but the coarse nature of grass may offer a different challenge. Reeves and Blau's "Approximate and Probabilistic Algorithms for Shading and Rendering Structured Particles" presents another method that might be explored in rendering grass.

Key Challenges:

Rendering with Three-Dimensional Textures: we will explore using Kajiya and Kay's techniques of texel shading in lrt. This can be applied towards our rendering of fur.
Generating appropriate textures to simulate grass and fur.

Possible Extensions:

Realistic wind effects, applied to fur and grass.
Use subsurface scattering to accurately render leaves in the grass.
Try using actual geometry to model blades of grass.