VRfx - A user friendly tool for the creation of photorealistic virtual environments

Abstract

By using VR, industrial designs and architectural studies can be evaluated in early stages of development. In order to judge visual appearances and surface materials, a high visual quality is crucial. Today's programmable graphics hardware allows rendering of photorealistic effects in real-time. Basically, this functionality can be ex-ploited in VR, but the amount of work for model creation must be by orders of magni-tudes lower than what's acceptable for computer games. Thus, a tool is needed which allows efficient preparation of design models from the digital process chain for high-fidelity VR models and which is easy to use for people who are familiar with model-ing or CAD software. In this article, we describe the software tool VRfx. which ad-dresses this task. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.