Displacement Rendering - Integration

In the past year, I have worked extensively on a separate rendering project to model industrial processes and systems to represent various types of pollution. A component of the forest Rendering project is to create forest systems that can interact with the systems from the Industrial Abstraction Project

Dying trees in front of an Insitsu Tar Sands Operation near Peace River, AB

 Much of my motivation for the Industrial Abstraction project is to produce media for activism and awareness about environmental issues.  Rendering forests systems fits withing this framework not only as background but also to show the physical impact modern and past industrial development has on forest environments.

Industrial Abstraction: Basic Tarsands Model

 The systems I have developed in the industrial abstraction project are quite simple while producing strong visuals.  These systems either are rendered as solid objects, or as semi transparent point sprites.  There is also a separate depth layer which contains the depth data for solid objects, as well as offset data for the heat distortion effect used in the heat vent and flare systems. 

Comparing depth maps is already necessary when combining the scene layer (with no forest) and the forest texture layer.  Solid objects are rendered to the scene layer with light emission data in the alpha channel, while depth information is rendered to the separate depth layer.

After the forest texture and scene layers are merged, a composite depth map is also produced.  Semi Transparent effects are then rendered in the correct order to the combined scene image, based on the combined depth image.

Distortion data from the point sprites are rendered to a separate effects layer, and are used to distort the final image. 

After the forest and scene layers are merged, and the visible effects are drawn to the screen, light bloom, depth of field, and anti aliasing filters are used to enhance the final scene image.  Integrating forests using Per-pixel Displacement Rendering requires a number of layers and filters, but can be successfully integrated with both solid model rendering, as well as transparent effects.