Month: July 2010

Today, a look at Fresnel-modulated reflections. Hardly a secret trick, but it makes a surprising difference for somewhat shiny objects. Fresnel reflectance is the property that glancing reflections are stronger than head-on reflections. It’s particularly noticeable in surfaces like water or glass, but is even visible on a piece of paper. Oh, and since Fresnel reflectance is named after a person, it should always be capitalized (and since he was French, you don’t pronounce the ‘s’).

The most important directions for Fresnel reflectance are the surface normal, N, the direction you see the surface from, V, the direction the reflected light is coming from L (all unit-length vectors). Since it’s dealing with reflected rays, N should be half way between V and L, so N = normalize(V+L) and dot(N,V) = dot(N,L). I’m ultimately going to be applying it to an environment map, so I’ll stick with the dot(N,V) version.

There are also constants that control the strength of the effect: n₁ and n₂, the indices of refraction of each material, or sometimes rewritten in terms of n, the ratio of the two indices of refraction. Indices of refraction for common materials are pretty easy to find in a Physics text or online: vacuum is 1, air is pretty close to 1, water is about 1.33, glass is about 1.5.

Fresnel reflectance has different terms for incoming light polarized parallel to the surface than for light that’s not parallel to the surface. I’ll add another direction T, for the refracted light, since it makes the equations easier, though you can always rewrite the refracted direction in terms of the reflected one.

The polarization dependence is handy if you’re using a polarizing filter to enhance or diminish the reflections in a photograph, but most graphics assumes unpolarized light, which is an equal mix of both terms. Cook and Torrance came up with the combined form that was used in graphics for many years:

If you don’t have the index of refraction, it’s easier to measure the reflectance at normal incidence (looking head-on where it is smallest). From Cook and Torrance’s paper, that’s

But… almost everyone these days uses Schlick’s approximation for Fresnel. There’s actually lots of good stuff on approximating functions in Schlick’s paper, but only the Fresnel approximation seems to have really stuck:

For a little more intuitive control, you can write this in terms of F₀ at normal incidence and F₉₀ at the edge of the object:

Image d above is what it looks like for a high dynamic range environment map. I’ve also included a regular Blinn-Phong layer with a light source positioned at the brightest point in the environment texture. F is just the blend factor between the two.

It’s important to use a high-dynamic range texture for this, because ordinary 8-bit textures can’t distinguish between “the sky is bright”, maxed out at 255 and “the sun is 10,000 times brighter”, also maxed out at 255. Multiply by 0.04, and you get about 10 in both cases. But image was exposed so the sky really is 255, the sun should be around 25,500,000. When multiplied by 0.04, that’s still 10,200,000 (or really bright). If we don’t keep the full dynamic range of the environment map, we get the somewhat disappointing result in image c

Oh, and images a and b are what you get for a couple of choices of constant blend fraction. The glancing reflections around the edges of the model really add an extra dimension of shininess.

This one is based on our recent High Performance Graphics Paper, “GPU Random Numbers via the Tiny Encryption Algorithm“, by Fahad Zafar, Aaron Curtis and Marc Olano.

Often you want a stream of random numbers in a shader. On the CPU, you usually have one stream of random numbers. Each time you ask, you get a new number. You might need to ask for new numbers a bunch for different things, but it doesn’t really matter if the requests for different purposes are all mixed up. On the GPU, you often want a bunch of independent streams corresponding to objects, characters, or grid cells in space. You want any GPU thread that asks for the random numbers associated with a particular stream to always get the same answers as a different thread asking for numbers from the same stream.

Several recent papers have used some kind of cryptographics hash for this. Cryptographic hashes are designed for things like signing messages, so the same input should always give the same result. That output should be pretty random (or someone might be able to crack the hash and sign fake messages, add viruses, or other nefarious things). We don’t care about the cryptographic security, but the other features are great for generating streams of random numbers: you put in the stream ID and a sequence number, and you get a random number. Since it’s a hash, every time you ask for the 5th number in the 1200th stream you get exactly the same answer.

The first graphics paper I know of to use this idea in graphics was my “Modified Noise for Evaluation on Graphics Hardware” from Graphics Hardware 2005. I used a modification of the Blum-Blum-Shub algorithm that pretty much destroyed all of its randomness, but made OK looking noise. In many ways, I was inspired by SGI’s lavarand, which encrypted an image of a bunch of lava lights to create random numbers (cool in its own right, though doesn’t really have the parallelization or repeatability). Tzeng and Wei (in “Parallel White Noise Generation on a GPU via Cryptographic Hash”, I3D 2008) used MD5, which was way more random than my stuff, but kind of slow. Our new paper uses the Tiny Encryption Algorithm (or TEA). TEA is actually a cipher rather than a hash, but for small input, it’s all the same. It repeats the same core mixing function for some number of rounds (64, when you’re using it for encryption). We show that lots of graphics tasks work well with just two rounds, but the more rounds you do the more random the results. After 8 rounds, it is random enough to pass both the DIEHARD and NIST randomness test suites.

For N rounds, it looks something like this:

uvec2 v = uvec2(stream, sequence);
uint s=0x9E3779B9u;
for(int i=0; i<N; ++i) {
    v.x += ((v.y<<4u)+0xA341316Cu)^(v.y+s)^((v.y>>5u)+0xC8013EA4u);
    v.y += ((v.x<<4u)+0xAD90777Du)^(v.x+s)^((v.x>>5u)+0x7E95761Eu);
    s += 0x9E3779B9u;
}
return v;

The s value is specified in the TEA algorithm, but the other hex constants are an encryption key, so could conceivably be changed to provide even more streams of random numbers.

For a streamlined two round version, I’d use something like this:

v.x += ((v.y<<4u)+0xA341316Cu)^(v.y+0x9E3779B9u)^((v.y>>5u)+0xC8013EA4u);
v.y += ((v.x<<4u)+0xAD90777Du)^(v.x+0x9E3779B9u)^((v.x>>5u)+0x7E95761Eu);
v.x += ((v.y<<4u)+0xA341316Cu)^(v.y+0x3C6EF372u)^((v.y>>5u)+0xC8013EA4u);
v.y += ((v.x<<4u)+0xAD90777Du)^(v.x+0x3C6EF372u)^((v.x>>5u)+0x7E95761Eu);

In fact, the pictures in my “distributing stuff” post were a bunch of points placed in a vertex shader using exactly that code. I happened to use OpenGL’s GLSL for that, but the Direct3D HLSL version looks almost identical, with uint2 replacing the uvec2.