NVIDIA Papers Win First and Second Best Paper Awards at HPG 2016

Date

Best paper:

Anton S. Kaplanyan, Stephen Hill, Anjul Patney, and Aaron Lefohn, "Filtering Distributions of Normals for Shading Antialiasing"

Second Best Paper:

Chris Wyman, "Exploring and Expanding the Continuum of OIT Algorithms"

2017 Grad Fellows

NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship Results for 2017

We are excited to announce the 2017 NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship recipients!

We know that there is incredibly important work taking place at universities worldwide, and the NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship Program allows us to demonstrate our commitment to academia in supporting research that spans all areas of computing innovation. In particular this year, emphasis was given to students pushing the envelope in artificial intelligence, deep neural networks, autonomous vehicles, and related fields.

A unistable polyhedron with 14 faces

Unistable polyhedra are in equilibrium on only one of their faces. The smallest known homogeneous unistable polyhedron to date has 18 faces. Using a new optimization algorithm, we have found a unistable polyhedron with only 14 faces, which we believe to be a lower bound. Despite the simplicity of the formulation, computers were never successfully used for solving this problem due to the seemingly insurmountable dimensionality of the underlying mathematical apparatus.

Infinite Resolution Textures

We propose a new texture sampling approach that preserves crisp
silhouette edges when magnifying during close-up viewing, and benefits
from image pre-filtering when minifying for viewing at farther
distances.
During a pre-processing step, we extract curved silhouette edges from
the underlying images. These edges are used to adjust the texture
coordinates of the requested samples during magnification. The
original image is then sampled -- only once!

Phenomenological Transparency

Translucent objects such as fog, clouds, smoke, glass, ice, and liquids are pervasive in cinematic environments because they frame scenes in depth and create visually-compelling shots.

Hashed Alpha Testing

Renderers apply alpha testing to mask out complex silhouettes using alpha textures on simple proxy geometry. While widely used, alpha testing has a long-standing problem that is underreported in the literature, but observable in commercial games: geometry can entirely disappear as alpha mapped polygons recede with distance.

Real-Time Global Illumination using Precomputed Light Field Probes

We introduce a new data structure and algorithms that employ it to compute real-time global illumination from static environments. Light field probes encode a scene’s full light field and internal visibility. They extend current radiance and irradiance probe structures with per-texel visibility information similar to a G-buffer and variance shadow map. We apply ideas from screen-space and voxel cone tracing techniques to this data structure to efficiently sample radiance on world space rays, with correct visibility information, directly within pixel and compute shaders.