Abstract
It has been a long time since outdoor environments needed a package to avoid unnecessary concern regarding outdoor parameters such as the sun position, sky color and shadows in real-time rendering. An intelligence system is in order to control these main factors for outdoor rendering environments. Calculating and measuring shadows with respect to the sun position in any outdoor rendering environments is a challenging and heavy task. In this paper we try to explore a method of exerting shadows on other objects with respect to the sun position in any given location, date, and time by means of a real-time sky color generation. The sun position makes up an important part of outdoor environments. Sky color is also the main background for any outdoor environments. To create shadows and shadow volumes, stencil buffer and depth buffer are employed. By calculating the sun position in any specific date, time and location, shadow is cast accordingly. Length and angle of shadow are two parameters measured for building designs which are calculated in this real-time application. Therefore, the application can be used to investigate the behavior of the sun position and location of shadows for any outdoor games and outdoor rendering.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Xiao, Y., Yicheng, J., Yong, Y., Zhuoyu, W.: GPU based real-time shadow research. In: 2006 International Conference on IEEE Computer Graphics, Imaging and Visualisation, pp. 372–377 (2006)
Crow, F.: Shadow algorithms for computer graphics. Comput. Graph. 11(2), 242–247 (1977)
Williams, L.: Casting curved shadows on curved surfaces. In: SIGGRAPH 78 vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 270–274 (1978)
Kolivand, H., Sunar, M.S.: Realistic outdoor rendering in augmented reality. Plos One 9(9), e108334 (2014). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0108334
Kolivand, H., Sunar, M.S.: Covering photorealistic properties of outdoor components with the effects of sky color in mixed reality. Multimedia Tools Appl. 72(3), 2143–2162 (2014)
Kolivand, H., Sunar, M.S., Rehman, A.: Extended edge silhouette detection algorithm to create real-time shadow volume. Int. J. Acad. Res. 4(3), 209–218 (2012)
Kolivand, H., Sunar, M.S.: Real-time outdoor rendering using hybrid shadow maps. Int. J. Innovative Comput. Inf. Control (IJICIC) 8(10), 1355–1361 (2012)
Tadamura, K., Qin, X., Jiao, G., Nakamae, E.: Rendering optimal solar shadows with plural sunlight depth buffers. Vis. Comput. 17, 76–90 (2001)
Chang, T.P.: The sun apparent position and the optimal tilt angle of a solar collector in the northern hemisphere. Sol. Energy 83, 1274–1284 (2009)
Nabeel, A., Al-Rawi, A.: Simple accurate and reliable method for measuring the sun’s elevation and orientation. Renew. Energy 1, 231–235 (1991)
SunErth (2012). http://www.sunearthtools.com. Cited 1st August 2012
Ismail, I., Kolivand, H., Sunar, M.S., Basori, A.H.: An overview on dynamic 3D character motion techniques in virtual environments. Life Sci. J. 10(3), 846–853 (2013)
Shuling, D., Cheng, R., Tizhou, Q.: Graphics real-time simulation of sky and sun in clear day. J. Comput.-Aided Des. Comput. 3, 305–310 (2009)
Wang, S., Wu, E., Liu, Y., Liu, X., Chen, Y.: Abstract line drawings from photographs using flow-based filters. Comput. Graph. 36(4), 224–231 (2012)
Bucholtz, A.: Rayleigh-scattering calculations for the terrestrial atmosphere. Appl. Opt. 34(15), 2765–2773 (1995)
Preetham, A.J., Shirley, P., Smits, B.: A practical analytic model for daylight. In: Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, pp. 91–100. ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., (1999)
Rnnberg, S.: Real-time rendering of natural illumination. Ph.D dissertation, Master thesis (2004)
Wang, C.: Real-time rendering of daylight sky scene for virtual environment. In: Ma, L., Rauterberg, M., Nakatsu, R. (eds.) ICEC 2007. LNCS, vol. 4740, pp. 294–303. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Dobashi, Y., Nishita, T., Kaneda, K., Yamashita, H.: A fast display method of sky colour using basis functions. J. Vis. Comput. Anim. 8(2), 115–127 (1997)
Raskar, R., Cohen, M.: Image precision silhouette edges. In: Proceedings of the 1999 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, pp. 135–140. ACM (1999)
Assarsson, U., Akenine-Mller, T.: A geometry-based soft shadow volume algorithm using graphics hardware. ACM Trans. Graph. (TOG) 22(3), 511–520 (2003)
Jung, S.K., Kwon, S.I., Kim, K.-J.: Real-time silhouette extraction using hierarchical face clusters. Department of Computer Engineering, pp. 1–8 (2004)
Billeter, M., Sintorn, E., Assarsson, U.L.F.: Real time volumetric shadows using polygonal light volumes. In: Proceedings of the Conference on High Performance Graphics, pp. 39–45. Eurographics Association (2010)
Perez, R., Seals, R., Michalsky, J.: All-weather model for sky luminance distribution-preliminary configuration and validation. Solar Energy 50(3), 235–245 (1993)
Dobashi, Y., Kaneda, K., Yamashita, H., Nishita, T.: Method for calculation of sky light luminance aiming at an interactive architectural design. Comput. Graph. Forum 15(3), 109–118 (1996)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kolivand, H., Sunar, M.S. (2015). An Intelligent Application for Outdoor Rendering Taking Sky Color and Shadows into Account. In: Fujita, H., Selamat, A. (eds) Intelligent Software Methodologies, Tools and Techniques. SoMeT 2014. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 513. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17530-0_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17530-0_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-17529-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-17530-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)