Adam Arbree

Research Interests

Subsurface Scattering and Rendering Translucent Materials

Many everyday materials, such as marble, skin, leaves, minerals and wood have a distinctive appearance that is due entirely to scattering of light within the subsurface of the material rather than from the surface itself. Capturing the delicate, rich and subtly important features produced by this subsurface scattering strains many rendering algorithms since they must compute the many individual interactions of the light with the material. My research seeks more efficient algorithms that reduce rendering cost by carefully isolating what subsurface interactions that contribute to visible features in the image and that use aggregate representations of the light distribution which capture smooth properties cheaply while preserving high-frequency detail. My most recent work applies these methods to the difficult problem of rendering heterogeneous subsurface scattering.

Scalable Rendering Algorithms

Though my recent work is focused specifically on translucent materials, my research focus has been on the broader problem of scalable rendering. Lighting, geometry and material models are rapidly increasing in detail and complexity. Scalable rendering decouples the cost of rendering an image from the complexity of the representation of the scene. By using intelligent hierarchical models of the light distribution and by exploiting limitations in the human vision system, scalable rendering algorithms can efficiently render images of scenes containing complex global illumination effects for large scenes with millions of polygons and even if the scene contains complex non-trivial subsurface scattering properties.

Dissertation

Scalable and Heterogeneous Rendering of Subsurface Scattering Materials Adam Arbree Ph.D. Thesis, August 2009

Graduate Publications

	Heterogeneous Subsurface Scattering Using the Finite Element Method Adam Arbree, Bruce Walter and Kavita Bala Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics '11 Supplemental Technical Report
	Radiative Transfer Framework for Rendering Materials with Anisotropic Structure Wenzel Jacob, Adam Arbree, Jon Moon, Kavita Bala and Steve Marschner SIGGRAPH '10
	Single-pass Scalable Subsurface Rendering with Lightcuts Adam Arbree, Bruce Walter and Kavita Bala Eurographics '08 2nd place in the Guenther Enderle Award for Best Student Paper
	Multidimensional Lightcuts Bruce Walter, Adam Arbree, Kavita Bala and Donald P. Greenberg SIGGRAPH '06
	Lightcuts: a scalable approach to illumination Bruce Walter, Sebastian Fernandez, Adam Arbree, Kavita Bala, Mike Donikian and Donald P. Greenberg SIGGRAPH '05
	Measuring and Modeling the Appearance of Finished Wood Stephen R. Marschner, Stephen H. Westin, Adam Arbree and Jonathan T. Moon SIGGRAPH '05
	Pre-processing Environment Maps for Dynamic Hardware Shadows Adam Arbree, Bruce Walter and Kavita Bala Technical Report TR2005-1998 Cornell CS Dept. July 2005

Undergraduate Publications