Modelling and Rendering of Realistic Waterfall Scenes with Dynamic Texture Sprites1.dvi

We propose an efficient approach for authoring dynamic and realistic waterfall scenes based on acquired video sequence. Traditional video based techniques generate new images by synthesizing 2D samples, i.e., texture sprites chosen from video sequence. However, they are limited to one fixed viewpoint and cannot provide arbitrary walkthrough into 3D scenes. Our approach extends this scheme by synthesizing dynamic 2D texture sprites and projecting them into 3D space. We first generate a set of basis texture sprites, which capture the representative appearances and motions of waterfall scenes contained in the video sequence. To model the shape and motion of a new waterfall scene, we interactively construct a set of flow lines taking account of physical principles. Along each flow line, the basis texture sprites are manipulated and animated dynamically, yielding a sequence of dynamic texture sprites in 3D space. These texture sprites are displayed using the point splatting technique which can be 1 Figure 1: One snapshot of the modelled waterfall scene with our approach. The image resolution is 700×400. The rendering speed is 20 fps. accelerated efficiently by graphics hardware. By choosing varied basis texture sprites, waterfall scenes with different appearances and shapes can be conveniently simulated. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves realistic effect and real-time frame rates on consumer PC platforms.