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| Number | Title | Issue Date |
| 8009168 | Real-time rendering of light-scattering media A real-time algorithm for rendering of an inhomogeneous scattering media such as smoke under dynamic low-frequency environment lighting is described. An input media animation is represented as a sequence of density fields, each of which is decompressed into a weight... | 08/30/2011 |
| 8004523 | Translation of register-combiner state into shader microcode An apparatus and method for translating fixed function state into a shader program. Fixed function state is received and stored and when a new shader program is detected the fixed function state is translated into shader program instructions. Registers specified by ... | 08/23/2011 |
| 8004522 | Using coverage information in computer graphics The boundary of a surface can be represented as a series of line segments. A number of polygons are successively superimposed onto the surface. The polygons utilize a common reference point and each of the polygons has an edge that coincides with one of the line seg... | 08/23/2011 |
| 7999808 | Parallel processing system, method, and computer program product for executing node traversal or primitive intersection A system, method, and computer program product are provided for executing node traversal or primitive intersection using a parallel processing architecture. In operation, it is determined whether a plurality of threads in a parallel processing architecture are to ex... | 08/16/2011 |
| 7999807 | 2D/3D combined rendering A system combines 2D and 3D modeling in rendering shapes and includes: a 3D modeling factory to generate a 3D model of selected shape parameters or features; a front face factory to generate 2D text and text effects, and some 2D shape effects; a ground plane factory... | 08/16/2011 |
| 7995060 | Multiple artistic look rendering methods and apparatus A computer system comprises a memory configured to store a geometric description of an object, wherein the memory is configured to store a first set of parameters associated with a first artistic look, and wherein the memory is configured to store a second set of pa... | 08/09/2011 |
| 7995058 | Method and system for identifying illumination fields in an image In a first exemplary embodiment of the present invention, an automated, computerized method is provided for determining an illumination field in an image. The method comprises the steps of identifying uniform and linear tokens in the image and utilizing the uniform ... | 08/09/2011 |
| 7995059 | Mid-field and far-field irradiance approximation A method for a computer system includes retrieving from a computer readable medium a first irradiance approximation for a plurality of light sources for a first distance in the midfield from the light sources; retrieving from the computer readable medium a second ir... | 08/09/2011 |
| 7990380 | Diffuse photon map decomposition for parallelization of global illumination algorithm A given computer graphics scene may be rendered as a set of triangles. A set of photons may be distributed over the scene, and a number of steps may be performed for each triangle. For each triangle, a list of photons may be constructed. For that triangle, a set of ... | 08/02/2011 |
| 7990381 | Re-coloring a color image Technology for re-coloring a region of a color image including determining an original base color in a region of a color image; establishing at least one shading parameter in the region of the color image; and combining a new base color with the at least one shading... | 08/02/2011 |
| 7986321 | System and method for generating structured light for 3-dimensional image rendering A system and method for illuminating an object in preparation for three-dimensional rendering includes a projection device configured to project at least three two-dimensional structured light patterns onto a 3-dimensional object. At least two cameras detect light r... | 07/26/2011 |
| 7982734 | Spatially-varying convolutions for rendering soft shadow effects Soft shadows may include areas that are less clear (more blurry) than other regions. For instance, an area of shadow that is closer to the shadow caster may be clearer than a region that is farther from the shadow caster. When generating a soft shadow, the total amo... | 07/19/2011 |
| 7973790 | Method for hybrid rasterization and raytracing with consistent programmable shading A method of generating a computer image wherein secondary raytrace vectors are calculated for the image after the image is rendered using rasterization. The secondary raytrace vectors are based on virtual camera angles that are stored during the rasterization proces... | 07/05/2011 |
| 7973791 | Apparatus and method for generating CG image for 3-D display An apparatus generates, by introducing a concept called “virtual viewpoint model”, a CG image for use with a 3-D display through single rendering operation from a single viewpoint without adoption of a process for performing CG rendering operation from a plurali... | 07/05/2011 |
| 7969437 | Method and apparatus for triangle representation Embodiments of the invention provide for accelerated polygon intersection testing of rays against a set of polygons. The amount of computation required in the rendering process is reduced by preprocessing the scene into a data structure that can be more efficiently ... | 06/28/2011 |
| 7969438 | Soft shadows for cinematic lighting for computer graphics A method and apparatus for high quality soft shadows for area lights in cinematic lighting for use in computer graphics, such as computer enabled animation. The method is an extension of traditional shadow maps, so the complexity of the present method is independent... | 06/28/2011 |
| 7965291 | Isosurface extraction utilizing a graphics processing unit A graphics system utilizes a graphics processing unit to implement marching tetrahedra extraction of an isosurface. In one embodiment locations of tetrahedral grids are represented as groups of four vertices for processing in the graphics processing unit. ... | 06/21/2011 |
| 7952581 | Realistic transformation of 3D lighting models A lighting model specified in light space may be transformed to a 3D scene, which may include numerous lights. When the lighting model is transformed to the 3D scene and is uniformly scaled or near-uniformly scaled, intensity or brightness of light at sample points,... | 05/31/2011 |
| 7952582 | Mid-field and far-field irradiance approximation A computerized method for computing an approximation for irradiance at a point in space from a plurality of distant lights sources includes determining a normal to a surface at a point on the surface being illuminated by the light sources, and determining a directio... | 05/31/2011 |
| 7952583 | Quasi-monte carlo light transport simulation by efficient ray tracing Methods, systems, devices and computer program code (software) products operable within a computer graphics system or other computer system enable quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) light transport simulation by ray tracing: and include constructing a bounding interval hierarc... | 05/31/2011 |
| 7948490 | Hardware-accelerated computation of radiance transfer coefficients in computer graphics A hardware-accelerated process of computing radiance transfer coefficients (such as for use in image rendering based on precomputed radiance transfer (PRT) techniques) is re-ordered as compared to previously known PRT precomputations to iterate over a sampling of di... | 05/24/2011 |
| 7940268 | Real-time rendering of light-scattering media A real-time algorithm for rendering an inhomogeneous scattering medium such as fog is described. An input media animation is represented as a sequence of density fields, each of which is decomposed into a weighted sum of a set of radial basis functions (RBFs) such a... | 05/10/2011 |
| 7940266 | Dynamic reallocation of processing cores for balanced ray tracing graphics workload A ray tracing image processing system may use a plurality of processing elements to render a two dimensional image from a three dimensional scene. A first portion of the processing elements may function as workload managers responsible for performing operations rela... | 05/10/2011 |
| 7940269 | Real-time rendering of light-scattering media A real-time algorithm for rendering of an inhomogeneous scattering medium such as fog with a surface object immersed therein is described. An input media animation is represented as a sequence of density fields. The algorithm computes surface reflectance of the surf... | 05/10/2011 |
| 7940267 | Systems and methods for graphical rendering A method of rendering a graphical scene includes determining a plurality of functions that contribute to a light transport model of a scene, factoring the plurality of functions into a set of fixed functions and one varying function, determining a first radiance tra... | 05/10/2011 |
| 7940265 | Multiple spacial indexes for dynamic scene management in graphics rendering According to embodiments of the invention, separate spatial indexes may be created which correspond to dynamic objects in a three dimensional scene and static objects in the three dimensional scene. By creating separate spatial indexes for static and dynamic objects... | 05/10/2011 |
| 7932905 | Method, apparatus, and computer readable medium for light energy accounting in ray tracing For ray tracing systems, described methods, media, apparatuses provide for accounting of light energy that will be collected at pixels of a 2-D representation without recursive closure of a tree of ray/primitive intersections, and also provide for adaptivity in ray ... | 04/26/2011 |
| 7928980 | Method for visualizing data clouds using color and opacity blending In order to address the challenge associated with the analysis and visualization of large datasets, a method and apparatus provides for visualizing data clouds using color and opacity blending. The information stored within the data cloud is represented using a data... | 04/19/2011 |
| 7924281 | System and method for determining illumination of a pixel by shadow planes A graphics processing circuit includes a pixel shader operative to provide pixel color information in response to image data representing a scene to be rendered; a texture circuit, coupled to the pixel shader, operative to determine a luminance value to be applied t... | 04/12/2011 |
| 7884820 | Interactive relighting with dynamic reflectance Interactive relighting with dynamic reflectance involves relighting a graphical scene with dynamic changes to the reflectance(s) in the graphical scene. A graphical scene may include source radiance, regions having reflectances, a surface spot, incident radiation fr... | 02/08/2011 |
| 7884819 | Pixel color accumulation in a ray tracing image processing system By merging or adding the color contributions from objects intersected by secondary rays, the image processing system may accumulate color contributions to pixels from objects intersected by secondary rays as the further color contributions are determined. Furthermor... | 02/08/2011 |
| 7872649 | Filtered specular reflection of linear light sources An image rendering method for a computer system includes identifying a point in space to be illuminated from at least one line light for the point, and determining an illumination direction of the line light. The method further includes generating a plane passing th... | 01/18/2011 |
| 7864177 | System and methods for real-time rendering with global and specular illumination Frames of image data representative of a scene containing deformable geometry are computed for display on a display device. Frame animation data is computed for a series of frames representative, in animated sequence, of a scene containing deformable geometry. The f... | 01/04/2011 |
| 7859531 | Method and apparatus for three-dimensional graphics, and computer product A graphic apparatus that draws an object three-dimensionally using a level plane and a height-axis perpendicular to the level plane includes a receiving unit, a calculating unit, and a drawing unit. The receiving unit receives vertex data identifying a position of a... | 12/28/2010 |
| 7830379 | Architectures for parallelized intersection testing and shading for ray-tracing rendering Ray tracing scenes is accomplished using a plurality of intersection testing resources coupled with a plurality of shading resources, communicative in the aggregate through links/queues. A queue from testing to shading comprises respective ray/primitive intersection... | 11/09/2010 |
| 7808501 | Method of shading using sample vectors A method of shading, by: storing shading information in a sample vector comprising a plurality of packets, wherein each packet represents a shading property; performing a series of sequential actions on the sample vector, wherein each of the sequential actions opera... | 10/05/2010 |
| 7796132 | Image generation system and program An objective is to provide an image generation system and program which can overcome the problem of flickering in screen due to the appearance and disappearance of distant objects. A depth cueing processing is executed such that the color of an object being more dis... | 09/14/2010 |
| 7796133 | Unified shader The present invention is a unified shader unit used in texture processing in graphics processing device. Unlike the conventional method of using one shader for texture coordinate shading and another for color shading, the present shader performs both operations. The... | 09/14/2010 |
| 7786993 | Environment mapping A system and method for environment mapping determines a computer-generated object's reflective appearance, based upon position and orientation of a camera with respect to the object's location. An embodiment of the present invention is implemented as a real-time en... | 08/31/2010 |
| 7782318 | Method for reducing network bandwidth by delaying shadow ray generation The present invention provides methods and apparatus in a ray tracing image processing system to reduce the amount of information passed between processing elements. According to embodiments of the invention, in response to a ray-primitive intersection, a first proc... | 08/24/2010 |
