This thesis is about real-time rendering algorithms that can render 3D-geometry with quality and design features beyond standard display. Examples include algorithms to render shadows, reflections, or transparency. Integrating these algorithms into 3D-applications using today´s rendering libraries for real-time computer graphics is exceedingly difficult: On the one hand, the rendering algorithms are technically and algorithmically complicated for their own, on the other hand, combining several algorithms causes resource conflicts and side effects that are very difficult to handle. Scene graph libraries, which intend to provide a software layer to abstract from computer graphics hardware, currently offer no mechanisms for using these rendering algorithms, either.
The objective of this thesis is to design and to implement a software architecture for a scene graph library that models real-time rendering algorithms as software components allowing an effective usage of these algorithms for 3D-application development within the scene graph library. An application developer using the scene graph library controls these components with elements in a scene description that describe the effect of a rendering algorithm for some geometry in the scene graph, but that do not contain hints about the actual implementation of the rendering algorithm. This allows for deploying rendering algorithms in 3D-applications even for application developers that do not have detailed knowledge about them. In this way, the complexity of development of rendering algorithms can be drastically reduced.
In particular, the thesis focuses on the feasibility of combining several rendering algorithms within a scene at the same time. This requires to classify rendering algorithms into different categories, which are, each, evaluated using different approaches. In this way, components for different rendering algorithms can collaborate and adjust their usage of common graphics re-sources.
The possibility of combining different rendering algorithms can be limited in several ways: The graphical result of the combination can be undefined, or fundamental technical restrictions can render it impossible to use two rendering algorithms at the same time. The software architecture described in this work is not able to remove these limitations, but it allows to combine a lot of different rendering algorithms that, until now, could not be combined due to the high complexities of the required implementation. The capability of collaboration, however, depends on the kind of rendering algorithm: For instance, algorithms for rendering transparent geometry can be combined with other algorithms only with a complete redesign of the algorithm. Therefore, components in the scene graph library for displaying transparency can be combined with components for other rendering algorithms in a limited way only.
The system developed in this work integrates and combines algorithms for displaying bump mapping, several variants of shadow and reflection algorithms, and image-based CSG algorithms. Hence, major rendering algorithms are available for the first time in a scene graph library as components with high abstraction level. Despite the required additional indirections and abstraction layers, the system, in principle, allows for using and combining the rendering algorithms in real-time.
downloadable thesis (German version, pdf format)
