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M. Wimmer:
"Advances in Real-Time Rendering";
Talk: Spring Conference on Computer Graphics, Budmerice, Slowakei (invited); 2009-04-23 - 2009-04-25.

Real-time rendering is a quickly developing field in computer graphics. Recent advances in graphics hardware make it possible to tackle completely new challenges, and to rethink old ones. While previously, the main focus of real-time rendering lay on classical problems like visibility and level-of-detail rendering, nowadays we see new challenges in the form of interactive procedural content generation, handling of massive amounts of data, and interactive simulation of extremely complex objects like trees.

In this talk, I will try to broaden the definition of real-time rendering and give some insights how to address new research challenges. Starting with a few classical problems like rendering accurate shadows, achieving smooth transitions between different levels of detail, and global visibility computations, I will then show a few examples of recent advances in real-time rendering. One challenge is the ever-increasing size of models due to automatic acquisition methods like range scanners. In a new system we have developed, we are able to visualize and interact with datasets of over 1 Billion raw points. Another source of large models is procedural modeling, and we have developed a method to aid designers in creating these models interactively. Finally, vegetation plays an important role in interactive scenes. I will show a system to simulate both illumination and animation in such complex vegetation very realistically.