High quality rendering using ray tracing and photon mapping

Abstract

Ray tracing and photon mapping provide a practical way of efficiently simulating global illumination including interreflections, caustics, color bleeding, participating media and subsurface scattering in scenes with complicated geometry and advanced material models. This halfday course will provide the insight necessary to efficiently implement and use ray tracing and photon mapping to simulate global illumination in complex scenes. The presentation will cover the fundamentals of ray tracing and photon mapping including efficient techniques and data-structures for managing large numbers of rays and photons. In addition, we will describe how to integrate the information from the photon maps in shading algorithms to render global illumination effects such as caustics, color bleeding, participating media, subsurface scattering, and motion blur. Finally, we will describe recent advances for dealing with highly complex movie scenes as well as recent work on realtime ray tracing and photon mapping.