Stochastic Transparency
Journal article, 2011

Stochastic transparency provides a unified approach to order-independent transparency, antialiasing, and deep shadow maps. It augments screen-door transparency using a random sub-pixel stipple pattern, where each fragment of transparent geometry covers a random subset of pixel samples of size proportional to alpha. This results in correct alpha-blended colors on average, in a single render pass with fixed memory size and no sorting, but introduces noise. We reduce this noise by an alpha correction pass, and by an accumulation pass that uses a stochastic shadow map from the camera. At the pixel level, the algorithm does not branch and contains no read-modify-write loops, other than traditional z-buffer blend operations. This makes it an excellent match for modern massively parallel GPU hardware. Stochastic transparency is very simple to implement and supports all types of transparent geometry, able without coding for special cases to mix hair, smoke, foliage, windows, and transparent cloth in a single scene.

Rendering

deep shadow maps

stochastic

transparency

sampling

shadow maps

Author

E. Enderton

NVIDIA

Erik Sintorn

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Computer Engineering (Chalmers)

P. Shirley

NVIDIA

D. Luebke

NVIDIA

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

1077-2626 (ISSN) 19410506 (eISSN)

Vol. 17 8 1036-1047 5601714

Subject Categories

Computer Engineering

DOI

10.1109/tvcg.2010.123

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