Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Ray Tracing

Ingo Wald, William R Mark, Johannes Gunther, Solomon Boulos, Thiago Ize, Warren Hunt, Steven G. Parker, Peter Shirley. (2007). State of the Art in Ray Tracing Animated Scenes. Eurographics State of the Art Reports.

Jensen, H. W. (2004). A practical guide to global illumination using ray tracing and photon mapping. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2004 Course Notes. (This is better appreciated when seen as a movie. http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/animations/ and click on The Light of Mies van der Rohe. - Alex)

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Photon Mapping:

For the photon mapping you really have to see it in action to appreciate it: http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/animations/ and click on The Light of Mies van der Rohe movie.

I've seen this work before and it's extremely impressive. The results he gets with little to no added computation at run-time over ray tracing is excellent. Of course the hard work is left to precomputation. I think what appeals to me about this is that it is getting closer to actual simulation of the real-world; it makes physical sense to use photons to model light.

One thing I'm shaky on is his explanation of why he uses Russian Roulette.

Unknown said...

Animated Scenes:

I didn't find this paper nearly as interesting as photon mapping. I felt like I was in data structures class with some algorithms (optimization) thrown in. Not really my cup of tea. Section 3.2.1 where they discuss the tension between application and rendering engine caught my attention but it was very brief. Is there no middle ground between say a scene graph and accelerated structure that could be easily used by application and rendering engine? Or is generating a better structure from a SG good enough?