title: Cone Tracing for Furry Object Rendering.
abstract: We present a cone-based ray tracing algorithm for high-quality rendering of furry objects with reflection, refraction and defocus effects. By aggregating many sampling rays in a pixel as a single cone, we significantly reduce the high supersampling rate required by the thin geometry of fur fibers. To reduce the cost of intersecting fur fibers with cones, we construct a bounding volume hierarchy for the fiber geometry to find the fibers potentially intersecting with cones, and use a set of connected ribbons to approximate the projections of these fibers on the image plane. The computational cost of compositing and filtering transparent samples within each cone is effectively reduced by approximating away in-cone variations of shading, opacity and occlusion. The result is a highly efficient ray tracing algorithm for furry objects which is able to render images of quality comparable to those generated by alternative methods, while significantly reducing the rendering time. We demonstrate the rendering quality and performance of our algorithm using several examples and a user study.
authors.forename: Hao
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Qin
authors.forename: Menglei
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Chai
authors.forename: Qiming
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Hou
authors.forename: Zhong
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Ren
authors.forename: Kun
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Zhou
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D003196:Computer Graphics; D006197:Hair; D012589:Sciuridae