Carleton University - School of Computer Science Honours Project
Winter 2021
Fast Real-time Reflections of 3D Imposter Sprites
Daniel Sturk
SCS Honours Project Image
ABSTRACT
Reflections play an important role in 3D graphics. By providing motion parallax and interaction between surfaces, they supply the visual cues needed to make the appearance of reality believable and immersive. Unfortunately, the computation of generic reflections, -especially for dynamically moving objects, mostly remains an unsolved problem in real time rendering, due to its emmensive performance cost. This project explores a promising yet obscure approach to rendering the reflections of moving objects. Rather than trying to compute perfect ground-truth results, it opts for a more pragmatic solution; high performance but approximate reflections instead. Imperfections are acceptable due to reflections typically being distorted anyways. It implements the technique with modern improvements, demonstrating its performance, readiness, and immediate potential for practical applications such as video games. The reflection rendering pipeline is paired with an interactive demo, all implemented for browser in the WebGL 1.0 API, making this proof of concept work on any operating system without installing anything.