Winners
The Computer Graphics Forum 2007 Cover Image has been selected by the CGF editorial board. We thanks all people who submitted this year, and hope that they will participate to the next year contest.
Winner of the Computer Graphics Forum 2007 Cover Image Contest
Andreas Dietrich, Gerd Marmitt and Philipp Slusallek
Uni.Saarbruecken (DE)
Image description: This image demonstrates how multi-level instancing in combination with ray tracing can be applied to photo-realistically render extremely huge, plant populated landscapes. By mapping a small number of individual plant sub-scenes repeatedly onto a large terrain, highly complex natural scenes can be formed. Our landscape consists of a polygonal ground terrain, and a number of fully modeled plant sub-scenes that are mapped onto the terrain. As source data for the ground model we used a digital elevation map of the Puget Sound Area (USA). The plant species themselves are highly complex alpha-textured polygonal objects, made of around 1,000 triangles for smaller plants, and up to 100,000 triangles for larger trees. The whole terrain spans an area of 81km x 81km and is populated by more than 20 billion plant instances, resulting in more than 90 trillion potentially visible triangles. Thanks to the logarithmic time complexity of ray tracing with respect to scene size, using parallel rendering on a shared-memory PC allows for near interactive frame rates. This can be done without any kind of model simplification or approximation, even under complex lighting conditions. For smaller resolutions and less complicated lighting a user can even interactively wander around the complete landscape.
Second place:
Adrien Bousseau, Matthew Kaplan, Joklle Thollot and Frangois Sillion
ARTIS INRIA (F)
Here is an image produced by our watercolor rendering. The algorithm take as input either a 2D picture or a 3D scene, and reproduce the specific watercolor pigmentation effects with simple image filters. Using a 3D scene, the movements of the pigmentation effects are mapped on the movements of the 3D objects to produce temporally coherent watercolor animations. More details are in our paper : Interactive watercolor rendering with temporal coherence and abstraction (available online : http://artis.imag.fr/Publications/2006/BKTS06/)
Third place:
Francesco Gabellone
IBAN CNR (I)
Virtual reconstructions of ancient contexts.