1st Edition

Realistic Image Synthesis Using Photon Mapping

By Henrik Wann Jensen Copyright 2001
    200 Pages
    by A K Peters/CRC Press

    208 Pages
    by A K Peters/CRC Press

    Photon mapping, an extension of ray tracing, makes it possible to efficiently simulate global illumination in complex scenes. Photon mapping can simulate caustics (focused light, like shimmering waves at the bottom of a swimming pool), diffuse inter-reflections (e.g., the "bleeding" of colored light from a red wall onto a white floor, giving the floor a reddish tint), and participating media (such as clouds or smoke). This book is a practical guide to photon mapping; it provides the theory and practical insight necessary to implement photon mapping and simulate all types of direct and indirect illumination efficiently.

    Introduction
    Realistic Image Synthesis
    Global Illumination
    Overview of This Book
    Fundamentals of Global Illumination
    The Nature of Light
    Lighting Terminology
    Light Emission
    Light Scattering
    The Rendering Equation
    Light Transport Notation
    Monte Carlo Ray Tracing
    Classic Ray Tracing
    Path Tracing
    Bidirectional Path Tracing
    Metropolis Light Transport
    The Photon-Mapping Concept
    Motivation
    Developing the Model
    Overview
    Photon Tracing
    Photon Emission
    Photon Scattering
    Photon Storing
    The Photon Map Data Structure
    The Data Structure
    Photon Representation
    The Balanced Kd-Tree
    Locating the Nearest Photons Efficiently
    The Radiance Estimate
    Density Estimation
    Derivation
    Algorithm
    Filtering
    Photon Gathering
    Visualizing the Photon Map
    Rendering Caustics
    Rendering Color Bleeding
    Fast Approximations
    Caustics Examples
    A Practical Two-Pass Algorithm
    Overview
    Solving the Rendering Equation
    Pass 1: Photon Tracing
    Pass 2: Rendering
    Examples
    Participating Media
    Light Scattering in Participating Media
    The Volume Rendering Equation
    The Phase Function
    Ray Marching
    Photon Tracing
    The Volume Radiance Estimate
    Rendering Participating Media
    Subsurface Scattering
    Examples
    Optimization Strategies
    Irradiance Caching
    Importance Sampling
    Visual Importance
    Efficient Stratification of Photons
    Faster Shadows with Shadow Photons
    Precomputed Irradiance
    Parallel Computations
    Basic Monte Carlo Integration
    The Sample Mean Method
    Variance-Reduction Techniques
    A Photon Map Implementation in C++
    A Cognac Glass Model

    Biography

    Henrik Wann Jensen