Disney Research Studios

This paper gives an end-to-end overview of 3D video and free viewpoint video, which can be regarded as advanced functionalities that expand the capabilities of a 2D video.

This paper describes human classifiers that are 'viewpoint specific', meaning specific to subjects being observed by a particular camera in a particular scene.

We present a new design formalism, Interactive Behavior Trees (IBT’s), which decouples the monitoring of user input, the narrative, and how the user may influence the story outcome.

Diffusion curves allow creating complex, smoothly shaded images by diffusing colors defined at curves. These methods typically require the solution of a global optimization problem (over either the pixel grid or an intermediate tessellated representation) to produce the final image, making fully parallel implementation challenging.

Efficiently computing light transport in participating media in a manner that is robust to variations in media density, scattering albedo, and anisotropy is a difficult and important problem in realistic image synthesis.

We focus on the latter of these problems and present an approach that captures and factorizes external lighting in a manner that allows for realistic relighting of both animated and static virtual objects.

We present progressive photon beams, a new algorithm for rendering complex lighting in participating media.

We present several techniques to alleviate this limitation, allowing the light transport from clutter in a scene to be accounted for.

Modular Radiance Transfer (MRT) models coarse-scale, distant indirect lighting effects in scene geometry that scales from high-end GPUs to low-end mobile platforms. MRT eliminates scene dependent precomputation by storing compact transport on simple shapes, akin to bounce cards used in film production.

This talk complements a technical paper and focuses on implementation issues, including how our run time is designed to scale across many different platforms, from iPhones to modern GPUs.