Real-Time Rendering Of Mesostructures

In this thesis, we describe an efficient technique for rendering rich geometric details (e.g., surface mesostructure) of complex surfaces. We use sphere-tracing aided by directional distance maps (DDMs) for quickly finding ray-mesostructure intersections. High accuracy is achieved by analytically detecting such intersections. Further, space requirement is kept low by adaptively sampling the distance field, and employing off-the-shelf hardware texture compression. Our rendering technique can handle complex detailed scenes containing mesostructures in real time with correct self-occlusion, self-shadow, interpenetrations and silhouettes. We demonstrate our algorithm on a variety of test scenarios.