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Realism in Computer Graphics

These notes have been created and revised each
year by many generations of CS123 TAs and by
John Hughes and Andy van Dam
Presented and updated in 2001 by John Alex
(former 123 TA, now a Ph.D. student at MIT)
See also Chapter 14 in the book

John Alex

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Realism in Computer Graphics

Roadmap

There are many definitions of realism - degree of

realism you want to achieve depends on context
medium (still images, movie/video special effects, VR,
etc.)
content
users
resources (time, money, processing power)

There are many categories of realism:

geometry and modeling

rendering
behavior
interaction

And many techniques for achieving realism within

each category
Many degrees of realism within each category as well
Graphics can be realistic in some categories and
unrealistic in others
Achieving realism usually requires making trade-offs
concentrate on the aspects most useful to your
application

John Alex

When resources run short, use hacks!

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Realism and Media (1/2)

Each medium has its own standard for realism

In the early days of computer graphics, focus was
primarily directed towards producing still images
With still images, realism typically meant
photorealism. Goal was to accurately reconstruct a
scene at a particular slice of time
Emphasis was placed on accurately modeling
geometry and light reflection properties of surfaces
With the increasing production of animated
graphicscommercials, movies, special effects,
cartoonsa new standard of realism became
importantbehavior
Behavior over time:
character animation
natural phenomena: cloth, fur, hair, skin, smoke, water,
clouds, wind
Newtonian physics: things that bump, collide, fall,
scatter, bend, shatter etc.

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Realism and Media (2/2)

Real-time vs. Non-real-time

Realistic static images and animations are usually

rendered in batch, and viewed later. They can often
take hours per frame to produce. Time is a relatively
unlimited resource
In contrast, other media emphasize real-time output:
graphics workstations: data visualization, 3D design
video games
virtual reality

John Alex

Real-time media drastically reduce time available for

geometric complexity, behavior simulation,
rendering, etc.
Additionally, any media that involves user interaction
(e.g., all of the above) also requires real-time
interaction handling

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Trade-off (1/5)
Hierarchies of needs and definitions

John Alex

We have a hierarchy of questions to ask before we

can decide what constitutes realism
Are we producing stills or animated graphics?
If animated, is it real-time?
If its real-time, is it interactive?
What are our computing resources?
What is our content and what is our audience?
Depending on our answers to these and other
questions, well come up with a delicately balanced
compromise between needs and costs
Its a matter of making the right trade-off for the
situation

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Trade-off (2/5)
Cost vs. Quality

Many computer graphics media (e.g., film vs. video

vs. CRT)
Many categories of realism to attend to (far from
exhaustive):

In a worst-case scenario (e.g., VR), we have to attend

to all of these categories within an extremely limited
time-budget
The optimal balance of resources for achieving
realism depends a great deal on context of use:

John Alex

geometry
behavior
rendering
interaction

medium
user
content
resources (especially hardware)

We will elaborate on these four points next

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Trade-off (3/5)

John Alex

Medium
as said before, different media have different
needs
consider a doctor examining patients x-rays
if the doctor is examining static transparencies,
resolution and accuracy matter most
if the same doctor is interactively browsing a 3D
dataset of the patients body online, she may be
willing to sacrifice resolution or accuracy for
faster navigation and the ability to zoom in at
higher resolution on regions of interest
User
expert vs. novice users
data visualization: novice may see a clip of data
visualization on the news, doesnt care about fine
detail (e.g., weather maps)
in contrast, expert at workstation will examine
details much more closely and stumble over
artifacts and small errorsexpertise involves
acute sensitivity to small fluctuations in data,
anomalies, patterns, features

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Trade-off (4/5)

Content
movie special-effects pack as much astonishment as
possible into their budget: use every trick in the book
conversely, CAD model rendering typically elides
detail for clarity, and fancy effects only interfere with
communication
Scientific visualizations show artifacts and holes in the
data, dont smooth them out. Also, dont introduce
artifacts due to geometric or rendering approximations
(e.g., contouring)

Resources
you settle for what you can get:
Intel 286 (1989): wireframe
bounding boxes
nVidia GeForce 3 (2001)
texture-mapped,
environment-mapped,
bump-mapped,
shadow-mapped, highpolygon, articulated,
physically-simulated
bliss at 60 hertz for $300
Microsoft Xbox (Nov. 2001):
complete computer with
graphics more powerful
than a GeForce 3 for about $300

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Trade-off (5/5)
Computing to a time budget (time-critical algos)

A vast array of techniques have been developed for

generating realistic geometry, behavior,
rendering
The best can often be traded for the good at a
much lower computational price
We call bargain-basement deals hacks
Some techniques use progressive refinement (or its
inverse, graceful degradation): the more time we
spend, the better output we get. Excellent for
situations when we want the best quality output we
can get for a fixed period of time, but we cant
overshoot our time limit (e.g., VR surgery!).
Maintaining constant update rates is a form of
guaranteed Quality of Service (a networking term).
web image downloads
progressive refinement for extremely large meshes

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Digression - Definitions

Texture-Maps: map an image onto

surface geometry to create the
appearance of fine surface detail. A
high level of realism may require
many layers of textures.
Environment-Maps: multiple image
maps which record the global
reflection and lighting on a object.
These image maps are resampled
during rendering to extract viewspecific information which is then
applied as a texture to the object.
Bump-Maps: fake surface normals by
applying a height field (intensities in
the map indicate height above
surface). From height field calculate
gradient across surface and use this to
perturb the surface normal.
Shadow-Maps: generate shadow
texture by taking silhouettes of
objects as seen from the light source.
Project texture onto scene from light
source. Note: must be recalculated
for moving lights.

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TechniquesGeometry (1/3)

The Hacked
Texture mapping: excellent way to fake fine surface
detailmore often used to fake geometry than to add
pretty colors
more complicated texture mapping strategies such as
polynomial texture maps use image-based rendering
techniques (see slide 23) for added realism

The Good
Polygonization: very
finely tessellated
meshings of curved
surfaces

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TechniquesGeometry (2/3)

The Best

Splines
no polygons at all!
Continuous mathematical
surface representations
(polynomials)
2D and 3D curved
surfaces: Non-Uniform
Rational B-Splines
(NURBS)
high order polynomials
are hard to work with

Implicit Surfaces (blobbies)

Subdivision Surfaces
elegantly avoid gapping
and tearing
support creases
allow multi-resolution
deformations (editing of
lower resolution
representation of surface)

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TechniquesGeometry (3/3)

The Gracefully Degraded

Level-of-Detail(LOD): as object gets farther away from
viewer, replace it with a lower-polygon version or
lower quality texture map. Discontinuous jumps in
model detail

Mesh decimation: save polygons

Left: 30,392 triangles

Right: 3,774 triangles

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TechniquesRendering (1/9)
Early Hacked
The Hacked
evaluate simple lighting equation only at polygon
vertices: just diffuse Lambertian reflection that
only accounts for angle between surface normal
and vectors to the light source. Interpolate color
values across faces: Gouraud shading

The Good
for non-specular (i.e., not perfectly reflective),
opaque objects, most lighting information comes
from the lights, and not globally from other
surfaces in the scene
can ignore global contributions and perform a
strictly local lighting calculation
introduce a constant ambient lighting term to
fake the lost global contributions
fake specular spots on shiny surfaces: Phong
lighting and Phong shading
fast!
easily implemented in hardware

fake reflection: environment mapping

fake shadows: shadow mapping

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TechniquesRendering (2/9)
An example: Quake III

Few polygons (i.e., low geometric complexity)

Purely local lighting calculations
Details created by texturing everything with
precomputed texture maps
surface detail
smoke, contrails, damage and debris
even the lighting and shadows are done with textures

John Alex

Bump mapping on some hardware

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TechniquesRendering (3/9)
The Best

Global illumination: find out where all the light

entering a scene comes from, where and how much it
is absorbed, reflected or refracted, and all the places it
eventually winds up
Three methods: Raytracing, Radiosity, IBR
Early method: Ray-tracing. Method to avoid forward
tracing infinitely many light rays from light sources
to eye. Work backwards to do viewer-centric
rendering: shoot viewing rays from viewers eyepoint
through each pixel into scene, and see what objects
they hit. Return color of object struck first. If object
is transparent or reflective, recursively cast ray back
into scene and add in reflected/refracted color
Turner Whitted, 1980
moderately expensive to solve
embarrassingly parallelcan use parallel computer
or networked workstations
models simple lighting equation (e.g., ambient, diffuse
and specular) for direct illumination but only perfectly
specular reflection for indirect (global) illumination

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TechniquesRendering (4/9)
The Best: Ray Tracing (cont.)

John Alex

Ray-tracing good for: shiny, reflective, transparent

surfaces such as metal, glass, linoleum. Can produce
sharp shadows, lensed caustics (focusing of light due
to interaction with curved specular surfaces). As
these effects appear relatively infrequently in
everyday life, grouped together they often look
characteristically computerish
Can do volumetric effects, caustics with
straightforward extensions (such as photon maps)

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TechniquesRendering (5/9)
The Best: Radiosity (Energy Transport)

Another method: Radiosity. Scene-centric rendering.

Break scene up into small surface patches and
calculate how much light from each patch contributes
to every other patch. Circular problem: some of patch
A contributes to patch B, which contributes some
back to A, which contributes back to B, etc. Very
expensive to solveiteratively solve system of
simultaneous equations
viewer-independentbatch preprocessing step
followed by real-time, view-dependent display

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TechniquesRendering (6/9)
The Best: Radiosity (cont.)

Good for: indirect (soft) lighting, color bleeding, soft

shadows, indoor scenes with matte surfaces. As we
live most of our lives inside buildings with indirect
lighting and matte surfaces, this technique looks
remarkably convincing
Even better results can be obtained by combining
radiosity with ray-tracing
Various methods for doing this. Looks great! Really
expensive!

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TechniquesRendering (7/9)
The Gracefully Degraded Best

John Alex

Selectively ray-trace. Usually only a few

shiny/transparent objects in a given ray-traced scene.
Can perform local lighting equations on matte
objects, and only ray-trace the pixels that fall
precisely upon the shiny/transparent objects
Calculate radiosity at vertices of the scene once, and
then use this data as the vertex colors for Gouraud
shading (only works for diffuse colors in static
scenes)

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TechniquesRendering (8/9)
The Real Best: Sampling Reality

The Kajiya rendering equation (covered in CS224 by

Spike) describes this in exacting detail
very expensive to compute!

John Alex

Previous techniques were different approximations to

the full rendering equation
Led to the development of path-tracing: point
sampling the full rendering equation
Eric Veachs Metropolis Light Transport is a faster
way of sampling the full rendering equation (CS224)

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TechniquesRendering (9/9)
Side NoteProcedural Shading

Complicated lighting effects can be obtained through

use of procedural shading languages
provides nearly infinite lighting possibilities
global illumination can be faked with low
computational overhead
but usually requires a skilled artist to get decent images

Pixars Renderman
Procedural shading is now in hardware
nVidias GeForce3 has programmable vertex shaders

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Image-Based Rendering (1/2)

A Different Approach:

Image-based rendering (IBR) is only a few years old.

Instead of spending a lot of time and money modeling
every object in a complex scene, take a photo of it.
Youll capture both perfectly accurate geometry and
lighting with very little overhead
Dilemma: how to generate views other than the one
photo you took. Various answers.

The Hacked

QuickTimeVR.
Stitch together multiple photos taken from the same
location at different orientations. Produces cylindrical
or spherical map which allows generation of arbitrarily
oriented views from that one position.
generating multiple views: discontinuously jump from
one precomputed viewpoint to the next. In other
words, cant reconstruct missing (obscured)
information

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Image-Based Rendering (2/2)

The Best

John Alex

Plenoptic modeling: using multiple overlapping

photos, calculate depth information from image
disparities. Combination of depth info and surface
color allows on-the-fly reconstruction of best guess
intermediary views between the original photopositions
Lightfield rendering: sample the path and color of
many light rays within a volume (extremely timeconsuming pre-processing step!). Then interpolate
these sampled rays to place the camera plane
anywhere within the volume and quickly generate a
view

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Temporal Aliasing (1/3)

Stills vs. Animation

At first, computer graphics researchers thought, If

we know how to make one still frame, then we can
make an animation by stringing together a sequence
of stills
They were wrong. Long, slow process to learn what
makes animations look acceptable
One problem: reappearance of spatial aliasing
Individual stills may contain aliasing artifacts that
arent immediately apparent or irritating
impulse may be to ignore them

John Alex

Sequential stills may differ only slightly in camera or

object position. However, these slight changes are
often enough to displace aliasing artifacts by a
distance of a pixel or two between frames

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Temporal Aliasing (2/3)

Stills vs. Animation

John Alex

Moving or flashing pixel artifacts are alarmingly

noticeable in animations. Called the crawlies.
Edges and lines may ripple, but texture-mapped
regions will scintillate like a tin-foil blizzard
How to fix crawlies: use traditional filtering to get rid
of spatial artifacts in individual stills

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Temporal Aliasing (3/3)

Motion Blur

John Alex

Another unforeseen problem in animation: temporal

aliasing
This is like spatial aliasing problem, only over time:
if we sample a continuous function (in this case,
motion) in too few steps, we lose the continuity of the
signal
Quickly moving objects seem to jump around if
sampled too infrequently
One solution: motion blur. Turns out that cameras
capture images over a relatively short interval of time
(function of shutter speed). For slow moving objects,
the shutter interval is sufficiently fast to freeze the
motion, but for quickly moving objects, the interval is
lousy enough to smear the object across the film.
This is, in effect, filtering the image over time instead
of space
Motion blur a very important cue to the eye for
maintaining illusion of continuous motion
We can simulate motion blur in rendering by taking
the weighted average of series of samples over small
time increments
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TechniquesBehavior (1/4)
Modeling the way the world moves

Cannot underestimate the importance of behavioral

realism
we are very distracted by unrealistic behavior even if
the rendering is realistic
good behavior is very convincing even when the
rendering is unrealistic (e.g., motion capture data
animating a stick figure still looks very real)

Hand-made keyframe animations

professional animators often develop an intuition for
the behavior of physical forces that computers spend
hours calculating
cartoon physics sometimes more convincing or more
appealing than exact, physically-based, computer
calculated renderings
vocabulary of cartoon effects: anticipation, squash,
stretch, follow-through, etc.

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TechniquesBehavior (2/4)
The Best

Motion-capture
sample positions and orientations of motion-trackers over
time. Trackers usually attached to joints of human beings
performing complex actions. Once captured, motion
extremely cheap to play back: no more storage required
than a keyframe animation. Irony: one of cheapest
methods, but provides excellent results
usually better than keyframe animations and can be used
for a variety of characters with the same joint structure
(e.g., Nancy Pollards research)

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TechniquesBehavior (3/4)
The Best (cont.)

Physics simulations
expensive, using space-time constraints, inverse
kinematics, Euler and Runge-Kutta integration of
forces, N 2-body problems. These can take a long time
to solve
looks fairly convincing

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TechniquesBehavior (4/4)
The Gracefully Degraded

John Alex

Simplify numerical simulation: consider fewer forces,

use bounding boxes instead of precise collision
detection, etc.
Decrease number of time steps used for Euler
integration
Break laws of physics (plausibly)

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Real-time Interaction (1/6)

Frame Rate

Video refresh rate is independent of scene update rate

(frame rate), should be >=60Hz to avoid flicker
Frame rate equals number of distinct images (frames)
per second
Best: frame rate is as close to refresh rate as possible
Best: frame rate is close to constant
humans perceive changes in frame rate (jerkiness)
fundamental precept of real-time: know ahead of
time (i.e., guarantee) exactly how long each frame will
take
well see later that this is a major advantage of
polygonal scan conversion over ray tracing

Bounded above by output refresh rate

refresh rate is the number of times per second that a
CRT scans across the entire display surface
includes the vertical retrace time, during which the gun
is on its way back up (and is off)
must swap buffers while gun is on its way back up.
Otherwise, get tearing when parts of two different
frames show on the screen at the same time
to be constant, frame rate must then be the output
refresh rate divided by some integer (at 60Hz output
refresh rate, can only maintain 60, 30, 20, 15, etc.
frames per second constantly)

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Real-time Interaction (2/6)

Frame Rate (cont.)

You can imagine trade-offs between interaction and

other factors of realism. Often, we will sacrifice
realism of rendering, geometry, or behavior for higher
frame rate and interactivity
Insufficient update rates can cause temporal
aliasingthe breakup of continuity over time
Temporal aliasing destroys the illusion of immersion.
Importance is application-dependent
in a CAD-CAM program, a 10 frame-per-second
update rate may be acceptable because the scene is
relatively static, usually only the camera is moving
in video games and simulations involving many
quickly moving bodies, a higher update rate is
imperative: often >60 frames-per-second are needed
motion blur is expensive in real-time graphics because
it requires calculation of state and complete update at
many points in time

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Real-time Interaction (3/6)

Frame Rate and latency

Frame time is the period over which a frame is

displayed (reciprocal of frame rate)
Problem with low frame rates is usually latency,
not smoothness
Latency (also known as lag) in a real-time
simulation is the time between an input (provided by
the user) and its result
best: latency should be kept below 10ms or there is a
noticeable lag between input and result
causes potentially disastrous results; a particularly
nasty instance is VR-induced cyber sickness which
causes fatigue, headaches and even nausea
lag for proper task performance on non-VR systems
should be less than 100ms

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Real-time Interaction (4/6)

Frame Rate and Latency (cont.)

Imagine a user that is constantly feeding inputs to the

computer
Constant inputs are distributed uniformly throughout
the frame time
Average time between input and next frame is of
frame time
Average latency = frame time
at 30Hz, average latency is 17ms>>10ms
at 60Hz, average latency is 8.3ms<10ms
frame rate should be at least 60Hz

Must sample from input peripherals at a reasonable

rate as well
often 10-20 Hz suffices, as the users motion takes time
to execute
high-precision and high-risk tasks will of course
require more
in CAVE many users prefer 12Hz (especially if it has
geometrical accuracy) to 510Hz; somehow it is less
disconcerting

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Real-time Interaction (5/6)

Rendering trade-offs

Frame rate should be at least 60Hz. 30 hurts for very

interactive applications (e.g., video games)
only have 16.7ms (frame time) to render frame, must
make tradeoffs
VR often falls short of this ideal

What can you get done in 16.7ms?

Do some work on host (pre-drawing)
Best: multiprocessor
accept and integrate inputs throughout frame (1 CPU)
update database (1+CPUs)

swap in upcoming geometry and texture

respond to last rendering time (adjust level of detail)
test for intersections and respond when they occur
update view parameters and viewing transform

do coarse view culling, scenegraph optimizing (1 CPU

per view/pipe)

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Real-time Interaction (6/6)

Rendering trade-offs (cont.)
Do rest of work on graphics hardware
Best (and hacked): multipass
full-screen anti-aliasing (multi-sampling and Tbuffer)
Quake III uses 10 passes to hack realistic
rendering

1-4 bump mapping

5-6 diffuse lighting, base texture
7 specular lighting
8-9 emissive lighting, volumetric effects
10 screen flashes

Good lighting and shading

Phong/Blinn lighting and Phong shading models
tons of texturing, must filter quickly (mipmaps)
and anisotropically (ripmaps)

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Raising the Bar

Improving standards over time
Bigger view, multiple views
engage peripheral vision
multiple projectors
caves, spherical, cylindrical and dome screens
render simultaneously (1+CPUs and graphics
pipelines per screen)
must do distortion correction and edge blending

stereo rendering (double frame rate)

John Alex

We rarely have the patience for last years special

effects, much less the last decades
The quality of realism increases with every new
technique invented
Was Tron a convincing virtual reality?
Final Fantasy and Pearl Harbor are convincing to
us today, but will they, too, look dated soon?
What will realism look like next year? Thats for all
you Sceneview hackers to decide

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Non-Photorealistic rendering
One last digression

Artistic renderingtrying to evoke hand-drawn or

hand-painted styles, such as charcoal sketching, pen
and ink illustration, or oil painting
For certain applications, elision of some details and
exaggeration of others can be helpful (mechanical
illustration, scientific visualization, etc.)
Non-realism is also used in behavior (cartoon
physics), interaction (virtual tricorder and other
virtual widgets), geometry (Monsters, Inc.)
There are exceptions:
Toy Story 2 tm
Graphics Labs SKETCH system emphasizes
simplified geometry as well as simplified rendering
some research has investigated cartoon physics and
other kinds of exaggerated motion and behavior

John Alex

Strategic use of non-realism is a brand new field with

many opportunities

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Brownies and NPR

Important recent SIGGRAPH papers!

John Alex

Brown and it graduates have become identified with

some of the hottest research in non-realistic
rendering: David Salesin, Cassidy Curtis, Barbara
Meier, David Laidlaw, Spike, and Lee Markosian are
all pioneers in the field.

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Browns Expertise in Realism

John Alex

Geometric modeling (Spike et al.)

Behavior/animation (Nancy et al.)
Rendering for VR (David et al.)
Interaction for VR (Andy et al.)
NPR (Spike et al.)

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