“Single-pass rendering of composable volumetric lens effects” by Tiesel and Borst

We describe an efficient single-pass rendering approach for composable 3D volumetric lenses. Composing rendering effects by intersecting multiple 3D lenses is a logical and intuitive extension of the Magic Lens metaphor and volumetric lenses. However, 3D lens composition was once considered intractable and recent multi-lens approaches require a number of passes that can grow exponentially with lens count. They generally involve substantial per-frame data structure generation or advanced techniques such as depth peeling. In contrast, we summarize a simple and effective technique that renders intersecting lenses of various shapes and effects in a single pass, does not require the maintenance of costly data structures, and can easily be incorporated into existing real-time rendering systems. It also supports more flexibility in the way complex lens effects are combined by using shade tree concepts to build composite shader programs.

1. Best, C. M., and Borst, C. W. 2008. New rendering approach for composable volumetric lenses. In IEEE Virtual Reality 2008, 189–192.
2. Tiesel, J.-P. 2009. Composable Visual and Temporal Lens Effects in a Scene Graph-based Visualization System. Master’s thesis, University of Louisiana at Lafayette.